 Long ago, there was a small village on the edge of a river. The people there lived in harmony with nature and each other, and life in the village was good. One day, as a villager began his early morning stroll, he noticed that the once vibrant river was looking slightly murkier than normal and contained some sludge and pollution resting on the banks. The villager quickly went out of his way to clear the pollution and restoring the flow, but the next day, the same villager noticed two lifeless fish in the river, and both fish were scooped out of the waters. The following day, debris started to build up, and the flow of the river started to become constricted, cutting off water to the village. Naturally, the villagers organized themselves quickly, setting up watchtowers and training teams of swimmers and environmentalists who could resist the swift waters and dislodge the debris. Cleanup squads were soon working 24 hours a day to keep up with the increasing pollution. While not all the fish could be removed from the river, the villagers felt they were doing well to clean up as much as they could. Indeed, the village priest even blessed them in their work, and life in the village continued on that basis for many months. One day, however, a young girl was playing by the riverside and saw the pollution, and she looked off in the distance and turned to a grandfather, asking, Where is all of the waste coming from? She then said, Let's organize a team to head upstream and find out who's throwing all of their trash into the river in the first place. However, the logic of the community elders countered, but if we were to go upstream, who would take care of the rescue operation? We need every concerned person here. Don't be ridiculous. The girl cried, but you don't see. If we find out who's polluting the river, we can stop the problem and no fish will die. It is far too risky, and we need all the help here, said the village elders. And so the numbers of fish found floating in the river continued to increase daily, and the river just got dirtier. Several days later, the young girl decided to go upstream herself to find the source of the corruption. Upstream, she found a mountain of plastic from the building of a nearby village that was releasing chemicals into the once beautiful river and blocking up the waterways. She smiled to herself and began to remove as much as she could, and as she removed the pollution, the river returned to normal, much to the confusion of the other villagers. This is a great little parable to consider when you're trying to explain the problem-solving process. To truly solve any issue, you have to come at it from different angles, sometimes multiples at once. It also speaks to solving issues at their core. Many times, like the flu or the common cold, once you start noticing symptoms, chances are the problem has been present for a while already. When faced with an issue, you can keep solving the consequences or effects that it causes and stay up to date with the issues. But unless you solve the root of the problem, it will keep producing more and more things that you have to deal with. Much like Western medicine, treating diseases as and when they appear, sometimes it's better to act in prevention and stop any foreseeable consequences in the first place. Perhaps we can even argue that treating the product of a problem isn't really a sustainable way of being. Since no matter how much energy we devote to them, our focus will always eventually be needed somewhere else. So the takeaway lesson from this parable then is to always look at a situation from every angle before making your decision on how to best act on it. Take into account every option and look for the root of the problem rather than just at its consequences.