Remember the old fable of the tortoise and the hare? I do
from my childhood, and I also remember a frenetic animated version of it.
As the story goes, when the race started the tortoise set off
and plodded along steadily while the hare played around in the erroneous belief
that it was fast enough to make up the difference and win no matter what. In
the end the tortoise was ahead at the finish line, the hare couldn’t catch up,
and the moral of the story is, as the saying goes, “slow and steady wins the
race”.
I think now as I thought then as a child - it wasn't that
the tortoise won the race. It was that the hare in its arrogance lost it.
Had the hare employed the same attitude of going forward
step-by-step at its own best pace, it would have won that race, probably by a
mile.
The truth is both could have completed the course in their
own best times and been satisfied with their own consistent efforts - because
the fallacy of the story is that life is a race at all.
But what if each had carried the other at different times,
so they arrived at the same time?
They might have gone even further along the
road together.
