Yearning to Learn

Short Note: I wrote this as a school essay- a picture composition, to be precise.There were two pictures- highlighting  a sparrow and a puppy- as is made obvious by the content of the essay. The sparrow was perched on a tree, in the process of making a nest,while the bird was shown running, with a collar wrapped around its neck. Our composition was to be a collaboration of the two images. That and a contextually relevant story is what I've striven to make it. 

Hope you like it.
PS: It was meant to be 250 words long- but it's crossed the 350 barrier! 

Yearning to Learn

Fluff rolled his tiny eyes and cleared his throat. A mellow squeak was the most he could spare. His limbs were as frail as the gulmohar branches by the foot of the huge tree. It was ten in the morning, yet the sun seemed a faint yellow tint in the morning sky. The loud barking of Master Carbon had ceased, but it clung to Fluff like a chameleon, throbbing like the percussion that James played.

Fluff scampered away with a light tip-toe. This time, every morning, would see him peer through a hole in his kennel near the villa at the wonder-bird Kerr and her work in progress. He would watch Kerr’s swoops and flips and trace her swift flight and try a comical imitation. He marveled at the sparrow’s skill of being able to weave such intricate nests out of ordinary branches. He wished that he too could do something out of the blue.

But this morning, Fluff wasn’t in his kennel. Crawling and crouching under the wooden fence, he had reached the foot of the gulmohar tree. The blossoms were fresh near the bottom-most branches and the breeze was scented with their sweet fragrance. The villa, enshrouded in orchids, provided a fine backdrop to the pretty picture.

In this ideal setting, an intricately woven sparrow’s nest had found its place, perched on one of the lower branches. Kerr arrived a few minutes later, and proceeded with her work on the nest. Fluff watched the bird’s techniques closely with interested scrutiny- and most astonishingly- they had undergone a metamorphosis! From the kennel, she seemed to crush the twigs and join them through tight knots, but right now, she was arranging them in a criss-cross pattern and laying them out.

“It’s almost as if it’s a learning curve for Kerr,” Fluff told himself contemplatively. “I never knew skills weren’t inbuilt, but had to be acquired. It is pretty much a learning curve for me, too.”

And more astonishingly than it was for Kerr to have changed her ways, Fluff, the once-intimidated, self-doubting, fragile runt, having drawn a profound conclusion from his deep observations of the ‘Sparrow’s Nest’, though in appearance much the same, discovered that he could play catch-and catch with Carbon and manage to win by several paces.

Moral: Life is nothing but learning. Not a single being cannot help what path he treads on and where he ends up. Knowing that genes or paralysis don’t define who you are and what your destiny states, have faith in yourself to discover your concealed abilities.  You must be willing to dig deep for what only you yourself can find- who you are.

Or, as Fluff puts it:

‘Skills aren’t inbuilt- they have to be acquired. And that is a learning curve.’