A lesson about the burden we carry with utmost care

One afternoon, Mahesh Goswami saw an ant carrying a big leaf across in his residence’s driveway. At one point, Goswami observed, the ant came across a crack in the pathway. It paused, analysed the situation, laid the leaf over the crack, walked over the leaf, picked it up on the other side and continued its long journey to its residence.

Goswami was captivated by the cleverness of the ant, one of god’s tiniest creatures. The incident left him in awe over the miracle of creation. In front of his eyes, there was this ant, lacking in size yet equipped with a brain to analyse, contemplate, reason, explore, discover and overcome. Along with all these capabilities, he also noticed that the ant had some human shortcomings.

Goswami noted that about 10 minutes later the ant reached its destination — a tiny hole in the floor, the entrance to its underground dwelling. How could the ant carry the large leaf into the tiny hole that it had managed to carefully bring to the destination? It couldn’t.

So the tiny creature, after all the painstaking and hard work and exercising great skills, overcoming all the difficulties along the way, left behind the 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 leaf was nothing more than a burden for it.

Isn’t that the truth of our lives? We worry about our house, car, bank balance, career and so and so forth have to abandon it all when we reach our destination – the funeral pyre.