I recently read an article in the paper. It was titled:
Not everything deserves your time and attention.
An elephant which had a bath in a river and was returning, reached near a bridge. It saw a pig fully soaked in mud coming from the opposite direction. The elephant gave way to the pig. The unclean arrogant pig went around telling the other animals that the elephant actually moved away to let him pass. On hearing this some elephants questioned their friend. The elephant replied ” I could have easily crushed that pig under my leg. But by doing so my leg would become dirty and I wanted to avoid that. Hence I moved aside. ” The moral of the story being, not everything deserves your time and attention.
Great story with a “keep-worthy” moral. But then, the following questions kept haunting me:

• Isn’t it important to let those pigs know that elephants can crush them and if they haven’t, then they chose not to.
• Can we just let the pigs keep ranting about things and not do anything about it?
• How easy is it actually to practice something like this?

With these thoughts in my mind, I tried to give different endings to this story. ( I must confess here that I tried out these different endings to this story in the “big bad world” that we live in while dealing with the pigs that I came across on the bridge. )

• What if the elephant had told the pig that he was waiting for the pig to cross because he had just had a bath and did not want to get dirty.
  Well, the chances are that the pig would still go around the forrest talking about the incident as his victory. Being in dirt is part of the pig’s “being” and he wouldn’t find any fault with it. So the elephant not wanting to get dirty is not something that the pig would have been able to comprehend.
• What if the elephant had crushed the pig under his feet:
  Animals in the forest would have blamed the elephant of not showing the maturity and intelligence that is usually associated with them. The talk of the forest would have been “After all, he was a pig. What more can you expect from him? “
• What if the elephant has asked the pig to return and wait on the other side till he crossed the bridge because he did not want to get dirty:
  Pig would have listened to the elephant and gone back but he would probably also leave some mulch behind on the bridge so that there would be traces of it on the elephant.

Under all these scenarios there is no change happening within the pig. So I finally conclude that the elephant did the wisest thing possible. Let the pig pass and then cross the bridge. 
But then, there is one question that still remains: Will the pig ever know?
Firstly, it is none of the elephant’s business.
Secondly, how do we know that pig doesn’t already know.
Pigs are not blind. They know very well that they are not even comparable to elephants as far as size is concerned.
Whenever pig looks at its own reflection, he is bound to see the traces of mud that is left behind on his body.
And if he chooses to do it in spite of all that, then, so be it!
I would like to add here that in this story, there is nothing wrong in the pig getting dirty or crossing the bridge first. The only avoidable deed was his arrogance and how he misconstrued the whole incident.
Let that elephant within you guide you while dealing with dirty pigs on the bridge. 

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