When I was a little girl, my father would take my brother and me out often on long nature walks. If we happened to pass by a creek or other water source, I would always want to do one thing: skip rocks.
The thing was, though, that I wasn’t very good at skipping rocks, at least in the beginning. My short, stubby, five-year-old arms couldn’t immediately grasp how to throw the stone “flat enough” so that it’d ricochet off of the water’s surface. But I was persistent enough to learn how to do it – especially after the first skip I got.
Granted, it was one flimsy little skip, and the rock sank to the bottom after that, but getting even just one skip in was enough for me to have faith that I could make all subsequent rocks skip like my father and brother. Succeeding even just that one time gave me hope.
Oftentimes, we want to give up because we don’t have any signs of hope. If more and more discouraging things keep happening to us, we lose our motivation. When we feel like no one is coming to help us, we think it’d be better to just give up. This feeling was observed in an experiment conducted in the 1950s by Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins. Richter began his experiment by placing twelve domesticated rats in a bucket full of water. Initially, the first three rats took a couple of laps around the surface and then dove to the bottom of the bucket to check out what was there. They lasted a total of two minutes before drowning. The last nine rats, interestingly enough, did not succumb nearly as quickly and actually swam for a few days before dying.
Richter’s second set of experiments tested on 34 wild rats, who were hypothesized to have much greater swimming abilities than their domesticated counterparts. Once again, Richter placed them in a bucket of water, expecting them to swim for much longer. Instead, within minutes of being dropped into the water, all 34 rats died.
Intrigued, Richter pursued one last set of experiments. He took another cohort of rats and placed them in the same bucket of water. This time, however, right when he could tell the rats were about to give up, Richter took them out of the water, dried them, helped calm them down, and then placed them back in the water.
These rats lasted much longer and swam for days. They also recovered much faster than the rats that were left alone. When the rats realized that they weren’t hopeless, that the situation was not doomed, that someone was coming to help them, they kept on swimming, knowing that their efforts would be worthwhile.
To be fair, life isn’t a rat race, and this experiment definitely shouldn’t be replicated today, but I hope each of you can hold on, no matter how rough this semester might get. Even if you have to step outside of the water for a while, you can keep going, just like those rats. If you can’t seem to skip across the pond on your first try, get up and try again!
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.