The Lazy Son

Many years ago when I was a child, I remember eating personal pan pizzas with my father and my brother. My brother, for some reason, decided to eat his pizza by consuming the portion at the center and working his way outwards. At some point, the pizza took on a ring shape. When my father saw this, he said it reminded him of a fable, which he proceeded to share with us. I spent... nine minutes or so just now trying to find the fable online but wasn't able to, so here is my best attempt at telling it from memory.

Once there was a mother who had a lazy son. One day, the mother needed to leave for a trip but knew that her son was way too lazy to cook for himself. Therefore, she baked a giant pie, cut a circular hole in the center, and draped it around his neck like a necklace. I imagine it looked a bit like one of those neck pillows some people bring onto airplanes. The idea was that whenever her son was hungry, he could dip his head downward and take a bit out of the pie he was wearing around his neck. When she returned from her trip, however, she found that her son had starved to death. It turns out that he had eaten the portion of the pie that was right in front of his face, but he had been too lazy to rotate the pie so he could eat the rest. 

I think the moral of this fable was supposed to be that if someone is really lazy, there's only so much you can do to help them. But the moral I extracted from this fable is that laziness really sucks. When you're lazy, you hurt yourself and you hurt others. The lazy boy obviously hurt himself by starving himself to death, and I imagine the mother grieved a lot as a result of her son's death, so she was hurt as well. 

So, why am I sharing this apparently obscure fable? Aside from the fact that a random incident this morning caused me to think of it for the first time in over a decade, I do think it is relevant to magical training. The boy in the fable only had to do a few things in order to survive. He had to lift up his hands, grab the pie, and rotate it. Sometimes, people complain to me that they have no time to practice the exercises of IIH. Perhaps this really is the case, especially if they are working two full time jobs or in some similar situation. But oftentimes, all it takes is a few small changes to free up enough time to practice the exercises and people are too lazy to make those few small changes. For the boy, the pie was already there. Similarly, for many people, the time is already there, even if they don't realize it.