Many years ago, there was a little new year born. Birth – a celebration of divine creation, gave rise to yet another new beginning. The air was filled with cries of excitement and laughter abundant. It seemed that mother earth was happily enjoying the shower of the warm and soothing sunrays that the “little new year” brought with it, as it dawned gently. The atmosphere was awakening to spread the spirit of a new beginning all around. Hope finally woke up after a long wait.
Just at it all seemed to be a rapidly inching towards a celebration all around; a little child nearby, in all its innocence noticed a feather swaying in the morning wind. The instinctive temptation of wanting to catch the feather was too strong a motivation for the child. He couldn’t care about the aimless directions of his playful steps or the meaningless objective of his carefree chase, of the feather.
Soon, some grown up children, playing further away noticed the chase. The sheer joyousness of the child’s activity seemed to arouse in them, a strong desire to have the feather too. One by one, they all rushed from many directions and approached the scene of action – the feather chase. The innocent child noticed them and found the joyousness in his activity instantly vanishing and replaced by an intense desire and anxiety to get to the feather first, at any cost. It became nervous and desperate.
The wind was unpredictable and so were the moves of the feather. Soon, there were a lot of children in the fray, for the feather chase. The first push was gentle; the resistance to that push was not. What followed was a lot of childish pushes, cries, fights, injuries, and eventually lot of unhappy children chasing that one little elusive feather. It required intervention from some elderly citizens around to restore calm. Our little child stood there weeping, completely shocked and silenced, in the midst of all the noise around. And the feather that it was wanting too vanished.
The distraught little child slowly gathered himself as his mother caringly too its custody, pretty relieved as the threatening group of children had gone away. He then became a bit cheerful as well, realizing that none of the other children too could get that elusive feather. Nobody won!
That night, the child asked his mother, “Where did the feather go Mummy?” The mother caringly explained to her child that the feather went back to its hen to help her warm the eggs she had laid and was expecting them to hatch and give birth to a new life, in the little new year, for a new beginning. Then, in order to divert the child’s attention from the “feather”, the mother lovingly said to the child, “Do you know where does a little chicken comes from? It comes from an egg! And do you know where the egg comes from? It comesfrom another grown chicken – a hen that lays that egg. And my dear child, do you know what came first - the chicken or the egg?” The child did not completely understand this question, kept thinking and soon fell asleep.
The hen and the egg, appeared in the child’s dream. Only the hen could hear and speak. The child first asked the hen for a feather. She happily gave the child a feather. Thrilled, the child further asked her, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” She promptly replied, “Little one, seeing is believing. In my life experience, I have only seen eggs being laid by other hens, who were always around, and even the feathers too belong to us (and not the egg), and it was therefore the little chickens that came first!”
As months passed by, our “little new year” grew older. The little child too grew up but did not give up its feather chase as it joined the same bunch of other grown up children, who too continued their feather chase.
Finally, the (no longer) “little new year” approached its end, HE aske
d the “little new year” its last wish. The now aged and wise “little new year” said; “It would be nice if little children could be granted the vision and desire to chase with curiosity and inquisitiveness, the valuable unexplored world within the egg of the universe, rather than merely chasing the feathers floating around.”Our “little new year” breathed its last, wishing another new “little new year” that was born within the egg of the universe, a new beginning!
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