There’s a book I like to read to my children called Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire. It’s about big, friendly, bear-like creature who really wants to live in the zoo. Unfortunately the zoo isn’t so interested. Maybe he doesn’t quite fit into their lineup of standard animals.
As if to echo the sentiments of the zookeepers, a boy and a girl outside the gates ask him: “why should they put you in the zoo? What good are you? What can you do?”
To prove his worth, our bear-friend shows off all the cool things he can do with his spots — a veritable Dr. Seuss-inspired panoply of various changes in color, size, and shape.
At the end of his skillful display, the boy and girl who had been watching him tell Mr. Bear (as we’ll call him) that he would be better off at the circus. On the last page, we see him juggling his spots and praising the circus as “the perfect place for me.”
It’s a nice kid’s book, but I feel it has a deeper message about the way many of us place ourselves into a box — a box that we don’t really fit into, at that.
How many times have you applied for a job and just thought “put me in the zoo! I want to be here, yes I do!” When you don’t get the job, you wonder why. After all, look at all the spots you juggled on your resume!
It’s amazing how we want to cage ourselves.
We have amazing talents and incredible abilities, and what we want more than anything else is to be trapped in a cubicle from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, pumping out work that bears no meaning to our personal growth…for what? Health insurance? To pay our bills? To avoid the shame or embarrassment of not having a salaried job?
Sometimes the zoo will take you in — and in many ways, that’s worse then when they toss you out.
At the books’ beginning, our bear friend is clearly admiring the way the zookeepers take care of the animals, clipping their nails and feeding them fish. Life is easy in the zoo. But that ease comes at the expense of living in a cage.
Unbeknownst to us — until it’s pointed out by others or occurs in an epiphany — there’s a better work environment that matches our talents and skills, where they’ll be appreciated, and where we can really shine. In Mr. Bear’s case, that would be the circus: a place much more conducive to spotted critters that can do parlor tricks with their natural camouflage.
I’d like to go one step deeper and propose that the boy-girl duo represents a process of self reflection and introspection, embodied by the way they watch Mr. Bear do various tricks with his spots. Indeed, in Jungian terms, the boy-girl pairing represents psychic wholeness, the conflation of male and female energies that is part and parcel of each and every one of us.
At the end of it all, they realize the circus is the best place for him. That’s what happens when you go through some serious self-assessment: you discover where you really belong.
So much of us are trying to get locked up in the zoo, when we really belong in the circus — whatever that means for each person individually. This is true in our professional and personal lives: we run to meet the expectations of others, and overlook our own happiness and fulfillment.
Even those of us who have our own business or work for ourselves frequently feel the need to box ourselves in. Why do we have to only be good at one thing?
There are definitely legitimate reasons to keep what you offer focused on one niche. But it shouldn’t have to mean that you as a person get boxed into one ability for the rest of your life. If you run a marketing business, you could also be an avid surfer, a self-published writer, a chef, a painter, and a parent. We all have plenty of spots to juggle, and the zoo isn’t the place to juggle them.
The circus…that’s the place for you.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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