WHEN LIFE FALLS APART!
Are you in a state when everything seems to be falling apart in your life? You don’t like anybody in your class. The moment you and your brother meet, you fight most gracefully. You look in the mirror and realize that your nose is too long. And you are getting acne of all sizes in your face. In short, unpleasant things are happening and you just cannot cope.
Well, meet someone who is literally, physically falling apart and still coping wonderfully surviving against the toughest situation. Meet BP Crow who lives in a bush tree opposite my building. BP Crow is not blood pressure, but bits and pieces. Here is a crow that seems bits and pieces and assembled all wrong. Some of bits and pieces keep falling off, yet BP Crow survives and seems happy about it.
To begin with BP Crow, he has lost all the toes and claws of one leg on an electric transformer a year ago. Next he lost the stump of a leg. That is why he sits on his belly all the time. When he tries standing, he falls down and to return his balance, he has to push his beak on the ground and liver himself up. His head doesn’t have that neat, back-combed – look all crows have – he has few feathers stuck out all directions as if someone had crudely glued them on him.
And then there was the day he got entangled in the wire netting and he lost most of his tails. As his one leg couldn’t lift his heavy body fast enough, his eyes took the sharp blow from the cat’s sharp claws.
Now we come to the beak. Till last week, he had a beak, which should have been on a Vulture. The upper half stuck out a few centimeters longer and was viciously curved at the tip. Of course, such a beak is a great asset in fights but eating is tough, for he had to cock his head sideways to get food into his mouth and he could not hold on to harder food like ROTIS to break them up, for how could he balance himself if his only leg was used for that?
And then, last week, BP Crow vanished. I went down with a basket to see if he was lying down wounded somewhere. But there was no sign of him and assumed that the inevitable had happed. After all, it is amazing, that in the highly competitive world of crows, with all his disabilities, with none to protect him, he had somehow survived this long. He undoubtedly had courage, which many of we human don’t have.
And one morning, he suddenly reappeared. And he no longer looked a crow. I had thought it was impossible for BP Crow to become more battered and moth eaten than he already was. But he had managed to become worse! That tough vulture beak had somehow broken halfway up and now he had a longer lower beak and a half-upper beak. He came flapping in a lopsided way, at the milk soaked bread. I hurriedly kept for him on the window ledge and fell head long into the food. He angrily protested when I tried to help him out. But he now ate digging his lower beak into the food and tilting his head backward to let it all go in. all the feathers on his back were gone. And one wing was clearly broken. It sat on him folded like a rag. But clearly the spirit wasn’t broken. His one eye shone like a star.
So, inspired was I by BP Crow’s surviving skills that I went back to the mirror to replace my gloomy sad face with a determinedly smiling one. I then looked at BP Crow again out of the window and this time my smile became a laugh of admiration. Do you know why?
Because in that broken beak, BP Crow was now holding a twig tightly. He was building a nest.
Even though life seems to be falling apart, there’s something you ought to look for. This life inspiring story was published in Simrik and authored by Manoj Kumar Thakur, Universal College of Medical Sciences, UCMS, Nepal.
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