Of elephant and men

Plans never seem to go to plan, or is it just me? More to the point I often get from A to B as planned but usually not in the way I planned.

For example I've always wanted to see an elephant in the wild and a few years ago a good friend ended up teaching in East Africa, so we took up the invite to go out. On our second day we were with a friend of our friend on a game drive in the middle of the night in an open top 4WD, we swung round a corner to discover 4 grey trees in the middle of the track. It became clear that these were connected to 2 large ears a large trunk set between 2 very large tusks, my first wild elephant, well furious actually.

At this point our friend killed the engine and the lights of the 4WD and the girls hid under the blanket (well known method of protection from 6 ton enraged pachyderm), he explained that we should all stay very still and after a while the elephant obviously decided that pulling branches off trees was more interesting than stamping on the rather smelly primates who'd disturbed its nocturnal ramblings.

So I got to see a "wild" elephant, quiet literally, but not as planned (which would have involved a good view from the end of a long zoom lens).

I'd been planning for some time to (a) find a new job and (b) spend more time with the family (I was traveling up to 70%) but as ever had been too busy/lazy (delete as appropriate) to do anything about it. So when I was laid off in August and there was serious illness in the family meant that option (b) came to pass (still working towards option (a)). I think it was God's intent that I should work on achieving these options (amongst others), but got fed up with my procrastination. I guess a rather dim shadow of how Paul's intent was always to visit the Church in Rome on the way to Costa del Sol, but didn't quite envisage to do so in chains at the whim a psychotic all powerful emperor.

Still we live and we learn (some of the time).

Picture : Elephant in the Samburu (Kenya).