Page 8 - Jeff the Monkey

Why should I go to all the effort and trouble of learning how to climb?” “Besides,” he told himself, “those trees are so tall that I’m afraid I might fall.” The others tried to get Jeff to climb one of the shorter trees to build his confidence. But he told them that he would not do that because the small trees had no fruit, “So why bother.”
It seemed to me that Jeff had created a set of problems for himself. He did not know how to climb and seemed to have some real Stinky Thinking about learning to climb. He was also unwilling to learn to climb the smaller, less scary trees, because they had “No fruit.” It looked like Jeff was about to have a real problem but as the crows say, “You made your nest, now you have to live there.”
The trees continued to mature and grow taller. Then one day the leader called all the troop together to tell them that they would soon have to leave the grove. He explained that very soon there would not be enough fruit for them to eat. “How will we move?” asked one of the younger monkeys.
“We will swing from tree to tree, searching for a new grove of young banana trees and once we find one we will settle down just like we did here.”
Jeff stood up and shouted at the leader “I’m not going! There has always been enough food here and I know that there will always be enough.”
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