Have you ever heard the story of the scorpion & the frog? It is one of the Aesop fables. The first time I came across this story was in a movie (I can’t remember the name right now). I was thinking about a post I wrote recently; can people really change? That’s when I remembered the story of the scorpion and the frog. It’s a really popular story, which has been cited many times, often with variations. The story speaks to the character of people and their ability or lack thereof to change. The story goes like this:

A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion says, “Because if I do, I will die too.”

The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp “Why?”

The scorpion replies: “It’s my nature…”

People in our lives can either be ‘scorpions’ or ‘frogs’. You might even be the scorpion/frog in somebody’s life. To survive in this cruel world we have to be able to identify the scorpions, while trying not to be frogs. Is there somebody in your life that is untrustworthy, unreliable & destructive? That person is a scorpion. Is there somebody in your life that you keep giving chance after chance, hoping they will change but they keep ‘stinging’ you? That person is a scorpion. The person that is always telling you that they are going to change but never does is a scorpion.

Scorpions can’t help themselves, it’s their nature. The only way to truly deal with a scorpion (besides killing it), is to stay away from it. If a scorpion is already in your life, get rid of it. If you don’t get rid of the scorpions in your life, you will suffer the same fate as the frog in the story.