Thank you, Little Red Riding Hood.
I bet at some point in your life you’ve read “Little Red Riding Hood”. In case you haven’t (or in case you need a refresher), though there are several versions of it floating around, here’s the super-abridged most well-known one: a young girl wearing a red hooded cape (Little Red) goes walking into the woods with some food to bring to her grandmother, who is not feeling well. She embarks upon her journey with strict orders from her mom not to dilly-dally, and not to talk with any strangers. On her way, Little Red decides to stop and pick some flowers to bring to her grandmother. While she is distractedly picking the flowers, she does not notice a figure coming out of the woods to sneak up beside her (the infamous Big Bad Wolf). After Little Red naïvely tells Big Bad exactly where she is headed, she starts back on her journey, rushing now to get to her destination. Big Bad, however, decides he is also going to head to the grandmother’s house and finds a shortcut, which allows him to arrive before Little Red does. At this point things go decidedly and rapidly downhill for the rest of the story.
For fun, let’s imagine that Little Red Riding Hood was going to be re-written today: instead of a young girl wearing a hooded cape walking through the forest, the main character could be a young person wearing earbuds (most likely with music playing much too loudly), walking down the street, face buried in his or her cell phone, totally oblivious to the world.
Or, perhaps, it could be any one of us, with our filled-to-the-brim to-do lists, and day after day being pulled off our intended path by phone calls, text messages, emails, and all kinds of other things.
In any case, I think there’s actually an important life lesson to take away from Little Red Riding Hood! For me, it’s this: distractions are life’s way of helping us measure our level of awareness and focus. They are also the way we gauge our true intention, purpose, and commitment. When distractions pop up repeatedly, and, more importantly, when we choose to give into them and they begin taking the place of our intended actions, we can stop and ask ourselves two questions to help us get re-focused:
- What am I avoiding?
- Why am I avoiding it?
The answers to those two questions - providing we are being honest with ourselves - will help us get to the bottom of what all those distractions are really about.
Sometimes it’s OK to put in our earbuds, blast our music, and drown out the noise of the world. And sometimes it’s OK to stop and pick some flowers for someone we love. We just need to make sure that while we’re lost in the music, or while our backs are turned, we aren’t letting a Big Bad Wolf slip in to take what’s really important away from us.
(For more life lessons, see also: “Cinderella”, “Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs”, “Sleeping Beauty”, etc.)