Have you heard the expression ‘throw your hat over the fence‘? Well, one day a boy comes across a dead-end road, and all there is between him and where he wants to go is a high fence. He doesn’t know how to get to the other side. What happens next?
A villager comes along and sees that the boy is trapped. He grabs the boy’s hat and throws it over the fence!
– “Hey, why’d you do that?!” he shouted at the elder villager.
– “Well, son. Your hat’s over there, and I can see that’s where you want to go. Now, you gotta go there.”
– “But how?!”
– “Your hat’s over there, so if you want to see it again, you’ll find a way.”
The wise man walked off, and the boy scratched his head. Sure enough, some time later he found a way to climb this hurdle before him.
Climbing over hurdles
Even though there are things we would like to do or want to do, it doesn’t mean that we do them. For example, perhaps you want to do more English outside of class. Write a diary, read a new book, study new vocabulary. Whatever it is, you end up procrastinating – you put it off:
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
The moral of this story is that for you to really achieve what you want, you need to throw your hat over the fence.
Throw your hat over the fence – and you can make it happen. You’ll find a way.
Which brings us to the next question: what can you do now to throw your hat over the fence?
Photo credits
Image Stephen Heron
Licence CC by 2.0
This reminds me of the saying “you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”.
I think we could share some stories on this Francisco 🙂
The thing is, this post is about getting people to find a way to drink..but sometimes I think blogs like this are ‘playing to the gallery.’ ie that learners who could most benefit from all this discussion are in fact elsewhere, whereas those who are reading this are already being active in English.
A good reminder for us all though.