Have you ever seen a mother bird driving its chicks away, sending them out into the raw and wild world all at their own? It pushes its babies to the edge of the nest, which the baby birds mistake for just their mother playing with them and respond equally playfully. Suddenly then, to their utter horror and grief, they are pushed past the bounds of the world that they had always known. Not only are they pushed past their horizons but rather dropped from heights or the comforts of a home into depths which seem oblivious and terrifying.
For a few moments the little one is so shocked and horrified that it goes numb, but in a drop of a few feet it understands that if now it has an accomplice or a partner, then that is no one except itself. It realizes that the only rescuer it has got now is itself. That is the moment in which the bird’s mind goes through a paradigm shift. It teaches itself to rely on itself, on its skills and abilities, which at that time, interestingly it does not even know it possesses. Though it’s not an intelligent being yet its brain tells it that to survive it must do something, it must do something fast. That is when, for the first time the little being stretches its wings and realizes that it is not so little. It is not so helpless. Though the world beyond him has suddenly evolved into something humungous, but then so has itself. It flaps its wings for the first time and gets to know the power of its feathers. It finds air to be its best friend. It finds its shoulders and arms, which it yet considered to be so fragile, strong and solid.
That is when it first embraces the glory of its true being. That is its moment of self-recognition and exaltation. It flutters its wings in desperation at first for survival but as it does so, the reality dawns upon it that it was never meant just for its survival. That is what makes it whole. It completes it. Fly, this is what it was born to do, not just to survive. This is what it is to do until it lives. As a famous poet once said
Open your wings, rise to fly
Gather life until you die
As it float passes tops of trees ,fields and houses the world which at a time had seen so big that it was almost scary starts to look small under the span of its wings. It sees lands and waters, meadows and dry lands and after all this time realizes that its mother had been absolutely right at that time pushing it off its nest. Its mother had been the reason it had got to test its limitations. Had it not been able to do that, it would have spent all its life believing in a world which extended just to a couple of inches dependent on someone else even for its little desires. It had hated its mother at that time for her cold hearted attempt to kill it by throwing it out of the nest but it’s only this late in life that it realizes that it was not an attempt to end life, rather to start one.
The number of lessons that we can learn from these small creatures’ life are numerous, but most important lesson to be learnt today is the belief in the ulterior motive of Mother Nature of our betterment. If we start believing in that, we can never fail in anything because then and only then will failure truly become the first step to success for us.