Froggy Jump!

Just yesterday, I was watching the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth"; Al Gore's documentary on global warming and climate change. I seriously recommend this movie to all those who care about the environment and even more seriously to those who don't; this one's just the kind that will scare your guts into caring. Anyway, this post is not about the environment. It derives from one of the factoids that Al Gore shared about frogs to explain the attitude of a lot of people, especially in the developed nations, towards global climate problems. So Al Gore says that a frog, when it jumps into boiling water, immediately jumps back out to save its life because it receives that painful jolt. But the same frog, if falls into tepid water, and somehow the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will simply continue sitting there, oblivious of the fact that its getting cooked to death, till its either cooked or rescued! Whats the point he's trying to make? That you need that one hard jolt to shake you up into action.
So as I sat down last night to chew on this in the lone time I had (of which, in the absence of suitable human distractions, I have a lot these days) I realised thats true over a really wide range of things. Your exams are on two weeks from now, and you sit here, writing a blog post, knowing fully well that you'll be cooked meat within the next fourteen days! But why do you not do anything about it? Because it moves slowly. One night before the exam, you'd realise that the grand feast is the day after and thats the fearful jolt that would hopefully kick you into action. For some of us, even that doesn't work. We're somehow so amazingly fearless, or unaware (whichever way you put it) that we'd still carry on the way we were going about right until the day the divine boot lands on our derriere and then the otherwise mundane task at hand becomes herculian.
Procrastination is not the only time this "Froggy Jump Syndrome" kicks in. Say you had a bitter fight with a friend today and the two of you decided to never talk again. A flashpoint in life, one would say. So tomorrow on, suddenly, there is one less person to talk to. And that hurts like crazy. The pain will slowly go away, but every time you sit and think of it even 10, 20 or 30 years later (if you were unfortunately never able to patch this up in that time), it'd prick you where it hurts most. Its deliberate. Something you don't want to do but can't do without.
Imagine now, a very close friend of yours from years ago. You were the best of friends, and could never do anything without the other's company. And then, one day, the friend had to move to a different town, or the two of you went your own directions in life, vowing to always keep in touch. Slowly, but steadily, time filled up that vacuum that was created by the others' absence. At first, you'd talk everyday, then once a week, slowly to once in a year. Each of you got busy with your own lives and lost touch to the point that you don't know where the other one is. The final result is the same in both cases. The feeling is extremely different.
What then is the moral of the story? That, in most cases, humans resist abrupt change. It makes us uncomfortable, squeamish and a little too conscious of whats happening around us. If the same change takes place gradually and inconspicuously, we'd find ourselves behaving very differently, or rather, indifferently. I guess this draws from some sort of a survival instinct. Fast is a challenge. Conspicuous and in-your-face is a challenge. Making a deliberate choice on the harder side is a battle that draws out the last possible ounce of strength. And if we let it go, the inbuilt fatalism somehow seems to take care of everything, be it a quarrel (which it may), or the environment (which it does not!).
So the next time you feel like a frog in boiling water (regardless of how fast it got hot), make sure you jump!
Thus ended the recondite rumination.