Hope for the Flowers

  

Hi guys! We just got back from  San Juan Surf Resort in La union where we surfed the entire weekend... I just wanted to share with you this wonderful short story I read...

I read this book way back in 2002 when I was a Quality Monitoring Specialist at Etelecare. It was my QM TL at that time who lent me her book which I thoroughly enjoyed. Years passed and I saw this book again on one of the shelves of Powerbooks (early 2006). Without much deliberation, I decided to get a copy of my own for posterity’s sake. It took me more than a year before I opened it and read it again. 

Hope for the Flowers is a book that can be read by both young and old. It basically depicts how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. It’s as simple as that, as how kids look at it. But the essence behind the literal story runs so much deeper and goes beyond science. I even consider its essence pure wisdom.

What I gather from reading this is that we are so much like the caterpillars in the book. We satisfy our basic needs and crave for more. We ask: "Is there more to life that this?" We feel that there is. It’s a basic human characteristic to always yearn for more and that’s alright. But how do we satisfy our curiosity? Most often than not, we are blinded by the every day grind that we fail to see the bigger picture. We see others compete for the best position without really knowing what’s there worth finding at the top. We just see them compete and so we join the bandwagon.

Perhaps, in a general sense, it is because that’s what’s expected of us. We see others as either merely obstacles or steps that will help us push our way to get to the top. In the process, we hurt others thereby hurting ourselves too, only to find out too late that there really was nothing meaningful up there. As the cliché goes: “It’s lonely at the top”. We fail to discern that this yearning for more has other more meaningful ways of satisfying it. Like looking deep within ourselves, identifying what our talents and capabilities are, and using these to fulfill our destiny, our destiny of not just being successful, but our destiny of being great.

 Now I wonder, how can we be like that? Kai said when I get to the top, I'll know that it was all worth it. I hope so. If not, I guess to each his own.