Hari Om
The Ant and the Rich man
On a fine Sunday morning, a Rich business man sat in his balcony enjoying sunshine and his hot coffee, when a little ant caught his eye which was going from one side to the other side of the balcony carrying a big leaf several times larger than 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 of its journey, the tiny creature came across a crack on 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 its journey.
The man was enthralled by the cleverness of the ant, one of God’s tiniest creatures. The incident left the man in awe and triggered him to contemplate over the miracle of Creation. It showed the greatness of the Creator. In front of his eyes there was this tiny creature of God, lacking in size yet equipped with a brain to analyse, assess, contemplate, reason, explore, discover and overcome. Along with all these capabilities, the man also noticed that this tiny creature shared some human shortcomings.
The man saw about some time later the creature had reached its destination – a tiny hole in the floor which was entrance to its underground dwelling. And it was at this point that the ant’s shortcoming that it shared with the man 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!
And therefore the tiny ant, 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 tiny creature had no option, but to leave it behind to reach its destination. The wealthy man learned a great lesson that day.
Don’t we see that truth about our lives?
We worry about our family, we worry about our career, we worry about how to earn more money, we worry about where we should live in –4 bedroom or 5 bedroom house,what kind of vehicle to buy – a Mercedes or BMW or a Bentley,what kind of dresses to wear, what kind of costumes to add, all sorts of things, only to abandon all these things when we reach our destination – The Grave.
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 that at the end they are useless and we can’t take them with us.
We lose our happiness by two unconscious habits of comparing to others and expecting from others.
We must understand the foolishness of trying to compare ourselves to others. We have to admit that no good ever comes from it. We have the habit of comparing with others, our home size, salaries, affluence, physical features, or any number of measurable (and also unmeasurable) things, we do it all the time. Most of our worries and stress arise due to this comparing habit.
So let’s stop comparing ourselves to others. We were not born to live someone’s life. There is no sense wasting our life (or energy) being jealous of theirs. Instead, let’s start living our lives. Let’s determine today to be good at it. After all, we only get one shot.
Never expect anything from others
Don’t expect people
-To respect you
-To like you
-To be like how you want them to be
-To be perfect
-To forget the past
-To change
-To thank you
-To read your mind
-To fall for you
-To be strong or kind
Just deal with everyone without judgement and condemnation.
Celebrate the presence of presence every moment by being in the present always. Come out of ‘becoming’ and experience the ‘being’. Not all you desires will happen in this life but what you deserve will happen certainly by GF’s Grace even if you don’t desire or expect …..🙏😊✋️
GF’ Blessings.
