Jaguar Looks Up
A mythical short story about realising the problem isn’t the noise, but where you’re standing.
Once upon a time there was a moody Jaguar.
Each night it would sit under the canopy of the Amazon rainforest and stare up at the night sky, at the moon. “Why are the insects being so goddamn loud??” he’d exhale in frustration. “Is there no peace here?! I must travel deeper into the jungle to find silence” he thought. So each night, after gazing at the moon, he’d slowly get up and start his journey deeper and deeper into the jungle.
It got darker, denser, wetter, and somehow, louder and louder. “Am I searching in vain?” he’d lament. “Am I the only one who cannot stand this racket? But this is my home, I have nowhere else to go…”. He felt stuck, trapped, and hopeless.
Grumpy old Jaguar; frowning. It’s pretty funny to watch actually, yet strangely saddening.
One day, as he climbed up a tree to rest, he thought to himself: “what if I go further up instead of wide?”. And so he did, climbing effortlessly all the way to the top of the canopy. But the branches were too thin to hold him, and he was struggling to stay balanced while they cracked beneath his paws.
He did not flinch; he did not retreat. He wanted to experience total silence and that is what he will achieve! So without fear, he summoned all his might and sprang up as high as he could, traversing the canopy and into the sky! And….nothing. He heard absolutely nothing. But saw much more, much farther, just for a split second until he started falling.
Just as he thought it would be the end of him, the wind blew a sturdy little cloud toward him, and to his disbelief, it landed beneath his paws. “I would have climbed all the way back up, jumped, fallen, and done it all over again if the wind hadn’t come to my rescue!” he thought. “Even if I’d be broken from the fall, that silence, it’s worth it. Thank you wind, thank you cloud.” He felt so grateful for he knew that they came to help him because he was meant to discover this silence. Because he knew that silence was sacred.
It was then that he came to understand that all this time, he was never meant to walk the earth. He was meant to ride the skies.
The End
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