Home: Blog: 2006-02-07 Digging Yourself Out of a Hole

I have recently become strangely obsessed with the idea of "digging yourself out of a hole".

It is a clear absurdity. Without digging, there would be no hole. Continuing to dig will only make the hole deeper. Imagine yourself, enthusiastically digging, head disappearing below the grass as you dig enthusiastically, only to realise that you are now trapped in a hole.

What series of elementary logical and epistemological errors, or indeed chemical imbalances of the brain, could lead you from the premise "I have dug myself into a hole too deep to climb out of" to the surreal conclusion "I can best resolve this problem by continuing to dig"?

You dig. It is becoming harder to hurl earth high enough so that it lands outside the hole rather than back inside. A small cone of soil on your head adds no dignity to an expression already betraying a certain sense of desperation.

You pray to the deity or secular humanist leader of your choice, crying for help - for some sign that your plight is not being ignored by a merciless cosmos.

You get one. It starts to rain.

It is a sign of your belatedly recovered intellectual maturity that the idea of digging through the earth's core and surfacing amongst bewildered antipodeans lasts only a few moments before being sadly relinquished. But it has been pressed upon you since childhood that it is possible to "dig yourself out of a hole". You decide that there are limits to mere intellectual understanding, and simply resolve to dig harder. With refreshed violence, you thrust your spade into the soil.

It breaks.

You are now in a hole with the following equipment: (a) a slightly curved metal plate, (b) a stick.

Angrily, you thrust your hands into your pockets. They are extremely damp: hardly surprising as the water level has now reached your neck.

You decide to review your options, and draw up the following mental list:

1. Drown.

Suddenly, at what is both physically and psychically your lowest point, you hear a voice. Looking up, you see a friendly face. Frankly, you are not interested in its configuration. It could be a cynically scowling face with a tinge of anxiety at the corner of the eyes telling of an unhappy childhood. It could be a moronic stare from an excessively short haired individual with SNIKS tattooed across their forehead. You're prepared to pull it from its neck to get out of this bloody hole.

You clutch the hand extended to you, and are dragged to the cratered surface of your lawn. It is with sadness that you remember the smooth, grassy expanse which offered pleasant afternoons of sunbathing and reading before the pursuit of downward mobility possessed your mind.

Your rescuer speaks.

"Why didn't you dig yourself out?"

It takes only a small push to catch your unsuspecting samaritan unawares and send him splashing into the hole.

"Why don't you try it?"

Don't dig. Just leave the whole digging thing alone. It can only lead to heartbreak and death. It you want to be somewhere where the earth is thinner, move: but sooner or later you'll have to face the fact that a certain amount of altitude is simply characteristic of the ground, and we are unwise to think we can safely reduce it.

Manny