Moving at a Snail’s pace….

This picture was captured quite a while back. It was in Vellore(TN) at a Fort which I had visited with a very close friend of mine. This is still one of my favorite clicks due to the magnificent message it conveys to me every time I look at it…. & today in this post, I shall share the same with my readers.

Lets first focus on our most elegant element in the picture… The Snail !!…

Snails are one of the earliest known types of animals in the world. There is evidence that they evolved more than 600 million years ago. They are able to adapt to a variety of living conditions and they don’t require large amounts of food. They have been able to continually evolve to survive the conditions around them which many researchers find to be very fascinating.

But what is it that I really admire about this creature…??

It’s the Snail’s patience and persistence to go that extra mile, that I admire the most. Instead of being the kind that would stay in one place and hope for food to come its way, it moves at the fastest pace that it possible can ( which is relatively the speed at which a glacier moves — Very very slow!!)… It puts itself through a lot of pain trailing across a rough terrain with its soft and tender body….but the level of consistency it displays with great patience, persistence and perseverance, is simply commendable!…

We face several challenges on a daily basis. Some of them are resolved in a jiffy, while others take a considerable amount of effort from our end. This creates an extreme amount of mental stress that blurs our judgment of seeing the macro picture of the end result. In such times of highly competitive work culture, we need to deliver results in a short period of time. And when we stumble upon hurdles that delay our process of delivering these results, we get impatient and take drastic steps to achieve these targets. The path that we choose happens to be the easiest way known to us, but possibly not the most acceptable & righteous one.

The stones pricking the Snail’s tender body makes me reflect the number of times we feel like giving up cause we can’t go on. We find ourselves in a position which seems that we would have to bare eternal pain. The terrain ahead of us doesn’t seem to improve and there is no turning back and finding a different way. Maybe we needed to go that one extra mile to find ourselves in a much more comfortable situation. Maybe we needed to hang on a little longer. Maybe giving up was the easiest way out. But won’t we regret not accomplishing the task at hand in the days to come. Isn’t the feeling of failure far worse than the pain we might temporarily have to bare. Isn’t the success we can achieve always worth fighting for.

What is it that we can learn from a Snail’s behavior? Although it is one of those creatures that is right at the bottom of the food chain, it still survives and depicts a great deal of patience & determination. So even if we happen to be at the lower most level in the organization, we still can be admired for our determination and passion to achieve the tasks we thought were difficult to complete. As you might know, with every improbable/ difficult task comes an opportunity to shine. Make others stop and ponder about the level of passion you can bring to the table, your potential that they most probably overlooked all this time & most importantly your will to achieve the improbable if not the impossible.