By Paul Chong
Sunday, 30 December 2018

When you get to be my age, an octogenarian, you’d have experienced much in life. No doubt your experiences are very mixed in nature – joyous or sad, interesting, exciting, thrilling & venturesome, ups & downs. Life’s journey won’t be the same for all. There’s however one common denominator . . . from the womb to the tomb there’s but one room all of us.

We like to remember the good times treasuring fond memories. But time passes by so rapidly that we never seem to have time for leisure & pleasure. Live then a life without regrets . . . if that is humanly possible.

All creatures great & small work & toil for the good things in life . . . only the privileged few are free of such burden. In the case of all ant colonies & related wasps & bees, they have some fertile males called “drones” (aner) and one or more fertile females called “queens” (gynes), all working & toiling for their privileged Queens.

Herein below is a great story about the ant & wealthy man, which story is truly superb & a big eye opener . . .

“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 its 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 learnt a great lesson that day.

Isn’t that the truth of our lives?

We worry about our family, we worry about our job, we worry about how to earn even 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 all these things when we reach our destination – The Grave.

We don’t realise in our life’s journey that these are just burdens that we are carrying with utmost care & fear of losing them,, only to find that at the end they are useless and we can’t take them with us . . . “

. . . a simple yet profound story!