Gazing at nature often gives powerful insights into one’s own nature. In one such solitude moment, I was witness to the universal nature of “Fear”.
There was this pigeon sitting on one of the trees overlooking my apartment. I am not sure what was he aiming to achieve, yet it kept on jumping from one branch to another for at least 10 minutes. During this sojourn, he also crashed into one branch head on, was dazed momentarily only to recover his balance a little while later. Finally, he chose to now settle on one branch. This branch was a father to a lot of twigs which was building material for the pigeon’s nest. I exclaimed Ah ha! It makes sense now. On settling down, the pigeon may have criticised himself for choosing the wrong branch for he had perched himself on a slippery branch and kept on slipping and losing his grip. On last count, it was 5 times. It was time to focus and he got it right the 6th time. By now, it had piqued my curiosity to sit and watch his next act. Sounds hilarious, yet in that flash came the birth of this short story.
Now came the next act. Pecking the twigs with his beak until he rips it gently from the branch. As he bent over, he got the biggest jolt of his life. To break the twig, he would need to bend to the very edge of his foothold until he was almost 75 degree – 90 degree to the ground. It is almost a cliff hanger moment for my friend.
This is when “Fear” took charge of the pigeon. As he struggled, he almost displayed uncanny similarity to our own fears we try to deal with. Sounds incredible! Even if he were to lose his balance and do a nose dive, he could always open his wings to fly. Yet, here he was working with his fears and struggling to break the twigs for his cosy nest. To finally bake the bread, the pigeon did succeed in overcoming his fear.
What about you and me? How do we deal with the “cliff hanger” moments in our daily life?
By the way, did you notice the space in each of the alphabets of the title. I believe that’s the space or window each one of us have to deal with our cliff hanger moments.
– #SJ
(* Image credits : Google)