One Sunday morning, a wealthy man sat in his balcony enjoying sunshine and his 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 more than its size. The man watched it for more than an hour. He saw that the ant faced many impediments during its journey, paused, took a diversion and then continued towards destination.
At one point the tiny creature came across a crack in 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 captivated by the cleverness of the ant, one of God’s tiniest creatures. The incident left the man in awe and forced 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 analyze, 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 an hour 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!
So the tiny creature, 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 creature had no option, but to leave it behind to reach its destination. The man learned a great lesson that day.
Isn’t that the truth about our lives?
We worry about our family, we worry about our job, we worry about how to earn more money, we worry about where we should live – 5 bedroom or 6 bedroom house, what kind of vehicle to buy – a Mercedes or BMW or a Porsche, what kind of dresses to wear, 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.
The story is very nice, but the comments also provide very good contribution. Life is an open book to observe and learn.
Great lesson human beings to learn!
a good lesson
please provide the copy and paste facility
Dear Sara,
The real lesson from this anecdote is that a man should embark on only projects that he is sure he has not only the necessary requirement to accomplish, but he also has clear aims for the project’s end use. The ant had all the means to transport the leave, but it had no plans to utilize it. The entire effort was thus wasted.
God Himself has enjoined on mankind to strive to survive physically as well as strive to earn Paradise. Man is rightly motivated by the virtues of family, commerce, profession, social responsibility, well being, etc to strive in life for success. A successful man, when he dies, simply passes the material things of his success on to his inheritors. His success, thus will not necessarily be a burden on him. He will have a burden only if while he struggled for success, he ignored and abandoned the rules regulating such struggles as enacted by God. His success will in this case not earn him the ultimate, which is Paradise. Then, his success would have been a burden on him.
That’s the way I see it.
Ant and bees are the most known deciplined insects. Subhan allah.
My observations are quite different in this regard. I have seen dead crickets, bees and other insects being carried by ants to its dwelling place and when the booty reaches the narrow door, more ant are called into service. The booty is cut into tiny pieces and taken inside in no time. May be the ants in my area are more intelligent than the ants observed by the writer.
Correct