The Bull And The Plank

A bull is a potentially dangerous animal: a plank is a plank. I saw a photo recently that had been shared on Facebook. It showed a sign on a field gate which read, “Do not enter this field unless you can cross it in eight seconds. The bull can cross it in nine!” A bull which feels that its territory is being invaded can be a very aggressive animal indeed. Given the chance, it will seriously injure you, possibly even kill you. So the sensible walker, faced with a field with a bull in it, looks for an alternative route to crossing the field. The Spanish matador (or to give him his correct title, the torero) on the other hand, deliberately goes into the ring, confronts the bull and in the end, kills it. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work like that; the torero isn’t as careful as he needs to be and is gored by the bull, ending up in hospital or occasionally, in the cemetery. A bull, whether you avoid it or confront it, is a dangerous animal, and you must deal with that fact or risk perishing. A plank, however, is simply a plank, an inanimate object. Planks used to be made of wood. Now increasingly they are made from metal. Apart from that, a plank is a plank is a plank. If I place a standard metal plank, the kind used in scaffolding, on the floor of my office and invite you to walk along it, you can do so easily and without undue concern. If I now place it on two bricks so that it stands a few inches off the floor you can still walk along it easily though you may be a tad more careful. Now, instead, I place it on two chairs; you begin to feel nervous. I take you and the plank outside and have it placed at roof height from the corner of the building to the corner of the next building. Neither you nor I would now risk walking along the plank. Why not? It’s still the same plank that presented no problems on the floor of my office. It is not the plank which changes but our response to the invitation to walk along it. So long as we think that everything will be fine, it is. Once we begin to have doubts, it’s not. And yet we’ve all seen photos from the 1920s showing steel erectors nonchalantly sitting on a metal girder several hundred feet in the air, eating their lunch. They know and have fully assimilated the knowledge that it is the same girder that it was when it was still on the ground. The bull is the one who determines what your experience will be; you are the one who determines what your experience with the plank will be. Where is the relevance of all this? If you suffer anxiety and phobia, the objects of your response are planks, not bulls. Change your attitude to the plank, and your behaviour towards it inevitably changes too. Whereas, no matter how well you convince yourself that a bull is a lovely, gentle, much misunderstood creature who just needs to be shown a little affection, the bull will still kill you if you trespass on its territory.