The Tortoise and Hare Quit the Rat Race

"What a dull, slow, heavy creature, this Tortoise!" said the Hare.

“Not really dull, but slow and heavy, you are right,” said the Rat.

“And you, Rat,” said the Hare, “Not so heavy, but just as dull. You are weaker than either of us. Nothing but an average rat. Average weight, and average smarts. A thin bag of Rat-bones. No hard shell to protect you like the Tortoise has, and no racing muscles as big as mine!”

“Just because the Rat is average,” said the Tortoise, “doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of great things. It is up to him—to decide to do the things that make one great—just like someone as heavy as me.”

“I completely disagree,” said the Hare.

"We’ll see," said the Tortoise, "because I'll run with you both for a wager."

"Done," said the Hare, and then they asked the Fox to be the judge.

The Tortoise, the Hare, and the Rat debated so loudly that a crowd of Rats gathered to see what all the fuss was about. Finally, the starting gun fired and the Hare scampered far, far ahead. The Rat, amazed at the speed with which the Hare hopped, simply stopped a few steps beyond the starting line.

“What’s the use?” he said. “I can beat the Tortoise, but I would never catch that Hare! I have better things to do, like digging through garbage cans for an easy prize—one I can taste—a nice, leftover piece of meat or bread.”
Meanwhile, the Hare laid down midway in the course, and took a nap.

“No worries,” the Hare said. “I bet I can catch up with the Tortoise when I please.”

But the Tortoise kept jogging until he came near the end of the course.

The Hare awoke too late to see the Tortoise inching toward the finish line. He scuttled as fast as he could but the Tortoise had already won by a scrawny neck’s length. The crowd of Rats was left scratching their heads with their hind paws. Where had the race gone so wrong? Their own brother-Rat had barely left the starting gate, where he remained in silent hesitation. Then again, most Rats never manage to leave the starting gate of life in general.

I thought of stories and metaphors that explain the human condition, and I chanced upon that old Tortoise and Hare fable. Yet when I thought about this old tale, it did not represent all people I now as either being a Tortoise or a Hare in life. In fact, most people I knew at that time of my life weren’t like the Tortoise or the Hare. I thought some more about this and realized that there was a missing animal from the fable—a Rat! An animal who is as passive as most of the people I knew, including myself. An animal that’s too passive to even join the race to a better life. The Rat is just like those of us so caught up in making a living we run that “rat race” people talk about, scampering around on a wheel and getting nowhere.

Soon, I found a correlation between these three animals that also made scientific sense. We were learning about personal boundaries in my classes, and it occurred to me that the Tortoise in the fable has a great personal boundary: tough against threats—what they call being “thick-skinned,” —and yet with places to pop his head and feet out when there is something good for him to eat or explore.

Both the Rat and the Hare are “thin-skinned” in comparison to the Tortoise—they are easily overcome by the elements of nature during the race. Yet the most profound thing of all about the fable was that both the Tortoise and the Hare at least tried to race. So there needed to be a Rat who didn’t even do that. Then all people could be represented by the fable, because we all are either a Hare, a Tortoise, or a Rat at any point in life.

Of all the depressed patients I’d seen, most people tended to get lower and lower in energy until they didn’t even try at life anymore. They were just like the Rat in my new fable. It often took a medicine to give them enough of a boost to get going again, with normal energy. However, I’ve seen just as many people on antidepressant medication who are still not happy and thriving in life. Oftentimes, these people are taking meds and not going to therapy. It then occurred to me that meds alone are not enough to help most depressed people to go from not just suffering to surviving, but onward to thriving. I started to apply these ideas in my own life, and realized that the first key to solving any problem is to be active rather than passive. To “quit the rat race.” Both the Tortoise and the Hare would have the advantage over the Rat in this department. Clearly, it is to our advantage to not be a Rat at life.

The Hare has a difficult flaw too, though. He is so impulsive. As I learned about the nature of anxiety through my studies of behavioral therapy, I realized that impulsiveness and avoidant behavior are both caused by one’s level of anxiety, ruled by an instinct we all have called the fight-or-flight response. It seemed to me that both the Rat and the Hare struggled with subduing this instinct and getting along in life without being crippled by anxiety. The Rat avoided life by stopping before he’d started and the Hare impulsively misgauged life.

So which was better to be? A Hare or a Rat? It turns out they are both equally impaired in life, and only the Tortoise has the high advantage.

Decisions, the “definition of life”: Growth vs. “Regression”

I soon realized through my little fable that what makes the Tortoise, Hare, and Rat uniquely different from each other is where they stand on decision-making. The Tortoise in us wants to make constructive decisions. The Hare in us tends to make destructive decisions, based on impulsivity—not thinking things through before acting. And finally, the Rat in us just doesn’t make decisions at all. He is completely passive.

All of this got me thinking about how these three little animals are in ALL of us. It is only a matter of which one dominates our personality. They race each other inside our mind’s psychology. Even though only one tends to win the struggle for our behavior, each has a life of his own. So if each of us is dominated by one of these little animals, then what kind of life does each animal lead us to? Just what is the “definition of life”? You know, the famous author Ernest Hemingway had a definition: “Life is a tragedy,” he said. Bummer. And look what happened to him. He offed himself. Maybe the same is true of singers Kurt Cobain and Michael Hutchence, and actresses Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. They may have had similar “definitions of life.” And yet, you look at Roberto Benini, the film director of “Life is Beautiful”, and you may notice what a happy guy he was as he trounced over the chairs at the Oscars to accept his prize. We all create our own definitions of life, but what one definition could we all share in common?

Biologists have an answer. They say that “life is irritable.” A living thing is defined as an entity that is impacted by the environment’s stress, and then makes a purposeful response to that stress. This implies that a decision has been made. Therefore, the only thing that all living things have in common is that they make decisions.

Even a tree makes a decision in response to the environment—its branches grow toward sunlight, not toward shade. A frog makes a decision to hop away from a predator. But rocks do not make decisions. When stressed by the environment, they only sit there. Rocks are by definition not alive, a fact which struck me.

The Rat in our story is being passive, and so he too is a little less than alive. Which means that when we humans are passive, we are not fully living either. Deep in the indecision of depression and substance abuse, a person will tell you that they feel a “little bit dead, not fully alive.” Did you ever see the film “Traffic”? Or “Leaving Las Vegas? Depressed people and substance abusers really are a little less alive. Now you know why. It is simply because they have stopped making decisions, and instead have started to let the world (or the drug) make decisions for them.

Don’t be a passive little Rat. Quit the Rat Race today by making some decisions. That is your best starting point out of a personal or business problem. Take action, even if it simply means reading the rest of this article.

The diagram above explains the importance of decisions in defining the uniqueness of one’s life, making us different from every other person alive. Being passive leads to “regression” of your maturity and ultimately to death by depression, substance abuse, etcetera. Being passive makes us just “one of the herd,” not unique from anyone else.

Conversely, any decision causes you to undergo personal growth toward a unique life and individualism. The Up arrow means “growth,” and the Down arrow means “regression” to less maturity and, ultimately, death. Maturity is life. So the Tortoise and Hare are growing, because at least the Hare has a chance to learn from his mistakes, but the Rat is dying.

In psychiatry training there is a model called the biopsychosocial model. All this means is that the sources of all psychiatric problems come from either (1) our brain’s biology, (2) a negative style of psychology, and/or (3) from social reasons like divorce, bankruptcy and the like. I took that third category and simply called it “stress” in my original model. “Stress” represents any outside threat coming from the environment, and is an easy word that everyone understands. In fact, in the system you are about to learn, I use the word “stress” to strictly mean “a negative emotional energy coming at you from outside of your personal boundary.”

You might start to see that if our three fable animals were in another race, both the Hare and Rat would fall very easy prey to “stress” due to their “thin skin,” but the Tortoise would be well-equipped against it with his hard shell, or “thick skin.”

So in which animal’s skin do you spend most of your time?

Paul Dobranksy, M.D.

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