Procrustes was an innkeeper that when his guests arrived he was kind and solicitous. According to mythology, when strangers lay down in bed, he would bind and gag them. If they were longer than the bed, he cut off their hands, feet, and even their heads, so that they would have the same dimensions as the cot. On the contrary, if they were shorter, he stretched them until he broke all their joints and disjointed them, with the same objective of “adapting” them to the length of that bed.
Procrustes’ bed represents, beyond the cruelty of its protagonist, all those rigid ideas that we have, pretending that reality adjusts to them. And not. It just doesn’t happen that way too often.
Reality is what it is, not what we would like. And we tend to act like Procrustescutting what protrudes from the bed, dismembering what is not enough. No? What is our systematic rejection of certain characteristics of our partner (fat, skinny, womanizer, spender, alcoholic, poor worker, and other stereotypes and prejudices)?
Or our children: lazy, fat, sedentary, student in a career “with no future”, etc.? What are our permanent disqualifications of ourselves because we are not as we “should” be? The list could be endless, so it’s best to leave it here.
A good paradox is how the myth ends. Theseus lays Procrustes down in his own bed, and it turns out that he doesn’t fit in that cheating bed either, so Theseus proceeds to dismember him so that he “fits in.” He applies his own medicine.
Nobody fits and there is nothing more tortuous than expecting our environment – or ourselves – to adjust to the arbitrary ideas and concepts we have. Guaranteed suffering.
Along the same lines there is an oriental tale in which a man finds a hawk and thinks it is a careless dove. He takes a pair of pliers and first cuts off its claws. Then proceed with the pickaxe. Finally, with scissors he trims the wings. When he finishes his “work” he feels satisfied.
-Now you are a dove As God commands, he thinks.
And this is how we act, with our environment (partner, children, siblings, co-workers), and with ourselves. And like that hawk, we may seem “neat” in relation to our criteria, but deep down, what there is, are mutilated beings.
In your life, who are you mutilating? To your partner? With what topics? To your children? What are the objects of your torture? To yourself? What things do you relentlessly reject?
Behind all this lies the mistaken belief that if things fit our criteria, everything would be fine. We would be at peace. We would have complete happiness.
And that is nonsense. Things don’t work like that. Even if everything were the way we wanted, we would continue chasing the horizon, trying to reach a place we can never reach.
Why can’t we leave others alone, and also ourselves?
there was a king So as not to hurt his feet when walking, he ordered his entire kingdom to be carpeted. They explained to him that in addition to being expensive, it was impossible. But he insisted: he didn’t want to get hurt, so walking on carpets seemed like the right solution. One of his advisors had a brilliant idea: cut a piece of carpet and tie it to his feet. With that he could walk anywhere without getting hurt, and above all, without having to carpet the kingdom. They say that this is how the development of footwear began.
Better to put on a pair of shoes and go out and walk through life than trying to carpet the world.
If you understand them, things are what they are. If you don’t understand them…things are what they are.
Juan Tonelli
Writer. Speaker.
Author of the book “An elephant in the living room, stories about what we feel and do not dare to talk.”
