“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci. Adopted by Steve Jobs.
Oxen were pulling a heavily loaded wagon. They used all their strength to pull the wagon but never complained.
The Wheels creaked and groaned at every turn. The Oxen, pulling the load through the mud, endured the work quietly.
Finally, the Oxen cried out “Silence! Why should you Wheels continue to complain about doing your job? We are pulling the weight, not you, and your useless noise only adds to the load.”
Moral of the Story: They who complain most tend to be those who suffer least. Complaining over the inevitable is a child’s indulgence that only adds misery. Whining does not resolve.
Introduction – The Essential Aesop – Epilogue
Why We Loved It: This fable reminds us to do our jobs steadfastly, and not to whine, which has no benefit.
Whining simply reinforces a negative in our own minds and burdens others with negativity.
Conveying a problem to seek a solution is not whining. Being “concerned” is a cerebral process, being “worried” is an emotional process, which are implemented very differently. There is a “new school” teaching that emotions are not “right nor wrong,” which I will suggest is misguided. There are positive emotions and negative emotions, but what categorizes them as such is wisdom, by determining what is furthering an objective or hindering an objective. But, even if the wheels objective is nothing other than to whine, it is an impolite imposition upon others.
Here, Aesop matches the staid animate active working Ox with the inanimate (although personified) passive Wheels. The Wheel are not working per se, but are ration being worked upon. Thus, the Oxen complain themselves, if we might see it as such, toward the complaining of the Wheels. But the difference for the Oxen is that they endure the pain of work, and the Wheels endure the pain without work.
As famously said by Steve Earle regarding implied whining:
“Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator.“
“You whining adult-children, and the new-math socio-psychologists who tell you that it’s okay to have riotous tantrums and to make everyone endure you. Like the infant who cries incessantly for the mother’s teat, you pray to god with a never-ending give-me, give-me, give-me, and then replace god with government and society. Always looking for a child’s allowance. God is dead. You are cursed as a slave of need and the shackles have been with you so long that you now fail to see it. You have the key to arise from the average and the normal, and to achieve the greatness that you have in self. Find your own unique power within and become, the Super Man.”
Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers! Do you give the horse his strength, and endow his neck with splendor? Do you make the steed to quiver while his thunderous snorting spreads terror?
He jubilantly paws the plain and rushes in his might against the weapons. He laughs at fear and cannot be deterred; he turns not back from the sword. Around him rattles the quiver, flashes the spear and the javelin.
Frenzied and trembling, he devours the ground; he holds not back at the sound of the trumpet, but, at each blast, he cries, Aha!
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© 2013 Arnold Zegarelli and Gregg Zegarelli, Esq.
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complainers-14-oxen-wheel-essential-aesop-back-gregg-zegarelli-esq-
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