Planking on upside down bus

It was over a month ago that I wrote a few posts on planking, including a story about planking. I even went so far as to create a category for planking. For those of you not familiar with what planking is, do a search on my site key word ‘planking’ and you will have a few planking articles.

I wrote about planking because it was a very hot topic after some guy died in Australia and I figured that I could get lots of traffic to my site. It worked. On the first day I got 1,250 views to my planking article and got an interview request.

My thoughts were that the whole planking craze would last no more than a couple of weeks and indeed it has been dying down. However the ‘Planking Australia,’ Facebook page has grown from the first time I looked at it when it had 20,000 people to now having over 500,000 likes! Planking is still making headlines in some places across Europe and the rest of the world. This past week it was on the news here in the US.

Planking started in Australia, and as it dies there, it has slowly come alive in the rest of the world. I find this interesting, because when I lived in Australia for 6 years I noticed that everything started in the US and Europe and then slowly made its way to Australia. Australia seemed to be behind in everything.

But now thinking about it, Australia is a country based on commodities. It exports raw materials: metals, wool, minerals, and so on. And thus it made sense for them to export planking. Planking is like a raw material that can be shaped into something, and therefore it made sense for Australia to export this.

Perhaps we can learn something from all this nonsense?

The Bal Shem Tov said that a person can learn something from anything he sees. Once while walking with his students they saw some Gentiles carving a crucifix from the ice. The students asked what could possibly be learned from this and the Bal Shem Tov was able to extrapolate a lesson from it.

I was thinking what could be learned from seeing someone laying face down in a planking position?  What can be learned from seeing a Facebook page grow to 400,000 followers about something as crazy as planking?

If you were to see someone lying face down on the ground what would your reaction be? Most of us would probably stop and check if the guy was alright and if he needed some help. In essence this is what is going on with planking. Millions of people around the world are laying on the ground saying ‘I need help.’ ‘I need something in my life.’ People are searching for meaning and for some spirituality and they want help.

Planking is way to express this but many express it in other ways. Perhaps we need to reach out to a friend who may not be literally lying face down on the ground but inside they are.  And maybe we can give them a helping hand to get them back on their feet.