monkeys and golfballs

I heard an interesting story tonight that I felt was worth repeating.  Now, my brain being what it is these days (distract ... oh, look. a bird!), I've forgotten some of the details, so I may not be telling it completely accurately. But the point, the moral, if you will, is still valid.

When India was still under British rule, a bunch of soldiers didn't quite know what to do with themselves so they built a golf course. Personally, I could think of better things to do with my time, but I digress.

After the course was built, however, and they started to play, they ran into a problem.  Whenever a golfball was struck, monkeys would run out of the jungle, pick up the golfball and throw it wherever they wanted.

By the way, I keep wanting to write "monkies" even though I know that's not the right way of spelling it. Weird, eh?

Now, I don't know much about golf, but I know enough to realize that this certainly doesn't help anyone win the game.  Now, to me, golf requires too much concentration and effort. I've never played it, but I hate mini golf, so why I would even attempt the real thing is beyond me. But I do realize that there are plenty of people out there who are very passionate about the game. And when there is something preventing them from playing a decent game, chances are good these golf enthusiasts will get very upset.

Therefore, monkeys running out of the woods, grabbing golfballs and chucking them would cause golfers to get rather frustrated and angry.

So these soldiers decided to build a fence around the golf course. 

Can you see the problem with this? Yes? Okay, good.

So I will simply say that when this backfired, the soldiers decided to start shooting the monkeys.

But for every monkey they shot, it's as if three more came out of the jungle and joined the golfball-throwing competition.  

So finally, the soldiers decided that they would simply continue the game from wherever the balls landed after the monkeys threw them. True, this probably made the game longer, more complicated, but I'll bet it lowered the frustration.

And I would imagine this also improved golfers' games. Because now they had to maneuver around obstacles and learn to aim in ways they didn't before ...

Living in a foreign country means that there are a lot of these metaphorical monkeys.  And a lot of these crop up because I just don't understand the culture. 

Funny, I came in here knowing that things would be difficult and thinking I could handle them. But I quickly learned that my handling strategy often involved getting mad at the monkey and/or ignoring the monkey. Let me tell you that neither of these strategies worked. Oftentimes, the thing that the monkey was keeping me from doing still needed to be done, so getting angry didn't solve anything, and no amount of ignoring would make the monkey go away.

I've since learned to become more flexible and to adapt to new situations. I don't always do this with the grace that I need, but I try.