Whatever be the circumstances you are placed in, whatever be the conditions around you, get on with your work and leave the rest to God.’ May I tell you, I learnt this lesson from an ant which I came across on a seashore, a long time ago.
I was relaxing on the beach when I saw this tiny ant hurrying past me. I was enjoying watching the majestic rolling waves at that time, but this tiny creature, scurrying about on the sand, caught my attention. In a playful mood, I decided to get to know this ant better. I made a tiny little heap of sand on its path. I say ‘tiny little heap’ from our human perspective, for the ant it must have been a little hillock. I created this little hill on the ant’s path. But she quietly came to the base of the hillock, climbed up the slope, climbed down the other side and went on her way.
Now I created a valley, that is, dug a deep trench on her path. Quietly, she went down the trench, crossed it and continued her journey. Not one to give up my experiment, I placed a large pebble on her path. She reached the stone, considered climbing it, realised that she could not; she struggled for a while, fell down a couple of times; she stopped a while to reconsider the situation, and then took the longe route around the stone and moved on. My next obstacle for her was a long twig. She saw the twig, struggled with it, found a way around and kept moving.
Keep moving, whatever be the obstacles on your path. Not once did my ant allow herself to ‘get stuck’ as we put it. Not once did she call upon her companions for help, and I am convinced quite a few of them were available in the vicinity. She just kept moving on.
Keep moving on and the potential that is within you will unfold. The tremendous shakti within you will be released. Many a time, we are overawed by the impediments and delays and the thousand-and-one hurdles that seem to be specially brought out on our path, even in routine everyday activities. Think of tougher tasks like applying for a housing loan or a business loan; think of applications made to foreign universities ; think of setting up your own business ; think of working for your Ph D; think of executing a complex project successfully; think of working with a team to achieve a goal. In all of these endeavours, we celebrate success in a spectacular way when the desired result is achieved. But who can forget the tough grind, the slow progress, the frustrating delays and the near desperate conditions that we had to cross before success was assured? And the one thing that assured success was this — that we kept moving, that we did not give up, no matter what the provocation.
-Dada Vaswani
