Life and its journey

A wealthy man was sitting in his balcony enjoying sunshine and his coffee when a little ant caught his eye. It was carrying a leaf several times more than its size. He saw that the ant faced many hurdles, took several diversions 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, analysed and then laid the huge leaf over the crack, walked over the leaf, picked the leaf on the other side and continued its journey.

The man was captivated by the cleverness of the ant, one of God’s tiniest creatures. The incident left the man in awe and forced him to contemplate over the miracle of God’s creations. Along with all these capabilities, the man also noticed that this tiny creature shared some human shortcomings.

The man then saw the creature reach its destination – a tiny hole in the floor which was an entrance to its underground dwelling. And it was at this point that the ant’s shortcoming that it shared with man was revealed. How could the ant carry into the tiny hole the large leaf that it had managed to carefully bring to its 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 creature had no option, but to leave it behind to reach its destination. The man learned a great lesson.

We worry about our family, our job, bigger houses, vehicles and many other things. We don’t realise 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 that at the end they are useless and we can’t take them with us.