Who will bell the cat?

I know some of you might have heard about this story, but I will just give a summarized version of it to those that don't know.

A group of rats was living peacefully in a house until one day, the owner of the house brought in a cat who have been wreaking havoc on the family of rats and killing them mercilessly.

The rats called a meeting to deliberate on the issue of the new cat and to decide what they will do about it. After lots of suggestions that aren't making sense, one rat finally said: "We should tie a bell around the cat's neck so it will alert us anytime he is coming".

All the rats loved the idea, and they were all happy that the problem has been solved. Then one of them said; "well, it seems we have finally gotten a very good solution to our collective problem, now who will bell the cat?".

There was dead silence everywhere and nobody could say a thing. They could all see the risk involved in carrying out the wonderful solution they came up with, and nobody dared volunteer to bell the cat. That was how the meeting ended, and they all lived the rest of their lives with the cat lurking around.

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This same problem the rats had also exist in our society; we see people saying things they can't do and coming up with suggestions they can't implement. Talk is very cheap, but when it comes to taking action it becomes a problem.

I saw this issue clearly in school yesterday when we met with our lecturer that announced that we will be going for our industrial training (IT) on January 3rd, 2022 and nobody could say anything about it, confused? Let me start from the top.

Last week, the committee we set up to oversee our IT activities came to tell us that the lecturer in charge said we will be starting our IT on January 3rd, and a lot of people including me weren't cool with it because that means we won't get to enjoy our new year break fully.

But instead of some of my classmates taking up the issue with the lecturer in charge, they faced the IT committee and started challenging them on why we had to start the IT so early.

The chairman of the committee then said anybody that isn't cool with the date should go meet the people that set it up, which inarguably means going to face the board of lecturers and professors in my department. That statement shut everyone up and I didn't hear a word from anyone again, aside from some side talks and gnashing of teeth.

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So yesterday, we met with the lecturer in charge of our IT and he was telling us about the arrangement of the activities. We will all be going to a big farm in the city, where we will stay and get first-hand training in the field for six weeks.

After the six weeks, we will all travel out to another state (Lagos) and we will be staying at the oceanography and marine research institute over there for about a month.

Since we will be going together, we will have to rent a house where everyone will be staying together for that six weeks (I am definitely not looking forward to that). But as for the Marine institute, we already have accommodation ready for us.

After the lecturer finished giving the breakdown, one of the committee members called on the people that complained about the date to say something since the lecturer is there, but nobody uttered a word!

This is the same set of people that were shouting and arguing when the date was announced, but now they are looking at the person that set the date and they can't challenge him, the bell became too heavy to hang around this cat's neck.

One thing I have learned about most people is that they can talk very well and give some of the "best" advice in the world, but when it comes to following what they have said, they get cold feet. Hypocrites? Looks like it.

An event also occurred when I was in my third year in the university and it was the first time we cultured fish. At one point, the fishes we were culturing were dying massively and we were thinking about just giving up and starting again with another set of fishes.

One of my classmates said we shouldn't do that, and she said maybe it's the tank where we were putting the fish that has something that is killing them, and she suggested we washed another tank, harvest all the fishes and put them in the new tank, then if they keep dying, we can consider starting again with another batch of fishes.

We saw her point and decided to follow her suggestion but when we were about to start the work, she disappeared. The rest of us did the whole thing and transferred the fish to a new tank, and that actually stopped the problem.

The person that came up with the idea just ran away when she saw the amount of work that goes into implementing her suggestion, it's easy to say all those things with her mouth but then putting it into work becomes a big problem; she couldn't bell the cat.

There are a lot of people like her, and they are usually in the lazy category. All they know how to do is talk, talk, and more talk and they are usually the first to criticize anything you're doing but when given the same task, they can't even do it not to even mention completing it.

I think everyone has been guilty of that at one point or the other in their lives, saying things we can't really do. Sometimes it's not on purpose and after coming up with a plan and we try to do it, we find out it's a humongous task.

It's not a bad thing to dream and talk about our plans and later work towards achieving them, but it's wrong when we criticize other people's work because they didn't do it a certain way and also start saying things they should have done differently when we can't even do those things.

It's said that action speaks louder than words, so we should do more actions than words from now on.

Side note

Whew! 😪 Finally done with this article I started yesterday, but I was too sleepy last night to complete it.

As I have said before now, I am not very active over here because I have been preparing for an examination I have on Saturday. I finally started night class on Monday and it was a great help because I covered two chapters of the textbook I am reading.

I was also at night class yesterday but I couldn't read because my body is trying to make up for the lost sleep from the previous night, but I woke up early and read a bit before completing this article.

I just can't wait for Saturday so I can be done with the exam and finally take a break 😪 For now I am still not very much available to interact here, but I still read a few articles daily. I will be back fully after my exam 😉

Thanks for reading 💖💖💖

Wednesday November 24, 2021