As the wind blows...

Last week, as I sat in the balcony on a very windy evening as part of my mindfulness exercise observing the world outside, I noticed a flock of birds desperately trying to reach their destination.

The destination was against the flow of the wind and they were often being blown back into their source location - something like one step forward and two steps backwards. However, over a period of time, they persevered and managed to make it through it to where they were headed, with consistent efforts after going around in circles for almost over an hour.

It is important to note that airplanes take off against the wind but most of us are not airplanes - with lots of energy and excessive power, to be able to sail through windy weather. However, once in the air, flights also use the wind to speed up their approach towards their destination. A good example of this would be the transatlantic flight that made it to London in record time using the jet stream.

One lesson from this is that sometimes, even though our destination aligns against the direction of the wind, and we may end up going around in circles for long period of time, we can approach the same destination via a different path, i.e., going along with the wind and using the tools available to us to navigate through to our destination.

The second lesson is to keep putting in consistent efforts, even though it may feel like an endless loop of failure and rejection. One must remember that it is never a straight path to success.

With perseverance and little smarts, and a little (or maybe a lot of) detour(s), sometimes it is better to flow with the wind even if that's not one path that we expected to take. After all, a path is only the means to the destination and not the destination itself.