Learn from Nature

We always had this pot in our garden, which was kept filled with a mixture of soil and compost. My mother would always use it while turning and changing the soil in all the other pots that we had.
The other pots were planted and grew beautiful flowers and fruits. Once when I couldn’t hold my eagerness any more, I asked my mother, “Why doesn’t this pot grow anything?”
And with great patience, my mother said to me, “Because it helps other pots to grow plants in them. It carries newly formed soil that has better water-holding capacity and manure that would provide necessary nutrition to the plants. If we don’t turn and change the soil in the other pots, their plants will stop growing due to nutrition and water deficiency.”
Since then, I developed love and affection for this pot. After all, it remained plantless and lonely and kept sacrificing its wishes for the life of the potted plants. Furthermore, it never held any grudge and didn’t get annoyed of this alienation. When my birthday arrived, I demanded and got this pot planted with a little plant. A plant that was as young and tender as I was.
Now, I loved both the pot and the plant. There were many changes that kept occurring in our lives but every morning, I would go and look at my plant without fail.
When the weather changed, we would change our clothes, but the plant learned to cope. It didn’t have to wear any shorts or coats and also in the hottest summer, surprisingly still, continued to grow. It kept growing in every season, whether it was bright and sunny or gloomy and dull or pouring and humid or mild and moist.
When it would flower and bear pretty red Hibiscus flowers, all the aunties in my neighbourhood would come to take some of the flowers to offer to their deities for worship. And even after this exploitation, it still grew. When it grew into a bush, my mother had to shift it to the lawn where it shared life with many other plants, but even in this vast competition, it kept growing.
At times, I would fall ill. It too, suffered diseases and its leaves got eaten by worms and yet again, new leaves appeared and it kept growing.
What I learnt from it was that no matter whatever the problems were, it tolerated all of them and kept developing. It persevered its way, from a tiny plant to a large leafy Hibiscus tree.
However, we, humans are different. In the present scenario, we are simply running in the rat race and put pressure on gaining mere bookish knowledge. We have abandoned the fact that living life righteously and being a good human being is much more important. We sometimes do learn and realise life’s lessons and afterwards trash them away. We grumble about every single thing.
Sharing and tolerance are now becoming things of the past. If we all can learn this effortless lesson of tolerance and perseverance, riots and wars could be averted.
A little tolerance can go a long way. We can begin learning from Mother Nature. The tolerance and perseverance that Mother Nature exhibits is priceless. And learning it will not only make us wise and enlightened, it will also create an ideal and noble society and an awe-inspiring stupendous world to live in as one great family.

(Contributed by Devraj Mohapatra, Class IV)
(Photo contribution: Sushmit Dutta)