One fine Sunday morning, a wealthy man sitting in his balcony was enjoying the sunshine with coffee when a little ant caught his attention. The ant was moving across the balcony carrying a big leaf several times its size.
The man watched it for more than an hour. He saw that the ant faced many obstacles during its journey, paused, took a diversion and then continued towards its destination.
At one point the tiny creature came across a crack in the floor. It paused for a little while, analyzed and then laid the huge leaf over the crack, walked over the leaf, picked the leaf on the other side then continued on its journey.
The man was captivated by the cleverness of the ant. The incident left the man in awe and forced him to contemplate the miracle of creation.
In front of his eyes, there was this tiny creature, lacking in size yet equipped with a brain to analyze, contemplate, reason, explore, discover and overcome.
A while later the man saw that the creature had reached its destination – a tiny hole in the floor which was the entrance to its underground dwelling.
And it was at this point that the ant’s shortcoming was revealed.
How could the ant carry into the tiny hole the large leaf that it had managed to carefully bring to the destination? It simply couldn’t! So the tiny creature, after all the painstaking and hard work and exercising great skills, overcoming all the difficulties along the way, just left behind the large leaf and went home empty-handed.
The ant had not thought about the end before it began its challenging journey and in the end, the large leaf was nothing more than a burden to it.
The man learned a great lesson that day. This is exactly the truth about our lives too.
We worry about our family, we worry about our job, we worry about how to earn more money, we worry about where we should live, what kind of vehicle to buy, what clothes to wear and what gadgets to upgrade, only to abandon all these things when we reach our final destination.
We don’t realize in our life’s journey that these are just burdens that we are carrying with utmost care and fear of losing them, only to find in the end, they are of no use and we can never take them with us…
The story isn’t over yet!
That wealthy man was a bit impatient. Had he waited a while more, he would have observed something else…
The ant vanished inside the hole leaving the large leaf outside.
Only to return with 20 more ants who broke up the leaf into tiny pieces and took them all inside.
Moral
1. Any Effort doesn’t go waste unless you give up!
2. Together as a team, Nothing is Impossible
3. Share the spoils with your brethren
4. (Most important!) If you carry more than what you can use, it will be enjoyed by others after you. So decide for whom are you putting in the effort.
Isn’t it amazing how much we can learn from even such a tiny creature as an ant!?
