SHORTSTORY

Wisdom Of Snail

A short story on that snail and other creatures

“In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all. ”― Iris Murdoch

There once lived a snail. It moved very slow compared to other creatures. But it knew within that it could not be any other way. So it made sense for that snail to drop the fantasies and fully immerse in the moments available for it in its slowness.

But the other creatures — those moving very fast in a hurry — could never find any sense in our snail’s life philosophy. Actually, they did not find any sense even in the existence of such a creature. So they kept moving fast towards their endpoint where they thought they could finally find joy and peace at the expense of missing being present in where they were. The faster you reach the endpoint the faster you can relax — was their philosophy. So they quite enthusiastically ignored the pain of not being here and kept moving faster.

But not all of them were completely lost. Some of them, no matter what, could not ignore the pain and suffering for some mere endpoint fantasy. They tried to ignore but they could not swap their intelligence for cleverness. So they stopped — risking failure. They had to do something about it. They can't just stand there. So then they remembered the snail. “Maybe there is something to be learned from that snail, maybe it got some secret, after all, what’s there to lose,” they thought and started their journey back towards the snail.

And so they moved even faster towards the snail in groups. But as soon as they reached near the snail our poor snail had to contract by reflex. There was nothing it could have done otherwise as it saw a group of other creatures approaching it in a hurry. The others — those creatures — got so annoyed and pissed off at the snail. But that only made the situation worse — as snail got contracted even more (withdrawn to itself). Some of them cursed the snail and went back to their journey.

Finally, the others, the leftover creatures, had to come to a decision: whether to wait for the snail to come out of its contracted state on its own or to continue with their fantasies even faster. Some of them could not risk, and so they left after a while and a very few stood there near the snail. But the very few standing near the snail were impatient, even though they decided to wait for the snail to get normal and teach them the secret.

The pain of impatience finally gave rise to the possibility of dropping the futile impatient waiting strategy, and so they learned to soften within and rest as the pain of ignorance with which they moved faster towards the endpoint began to arise again. This time they had no choice but to accept and eat it up as our snail slowly unwind back to its normal state of being.

But in that waiting period, they had learned everything they had to learn. So now when the snail came back to its normal state, there was nothing for it to teach them (as if it could teach them other than to live its nature as it is). All of them slowly began to move at their natural pace but this time without the burden of ignorance to be carried with them.

“Nothing forces us to know What we do not want to know Except pain”― Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides