Where There is a Will...

The last fiery rays were clinging to the sky, sending bright red streaks across the horizon in a vain attempt to hang on. The waves crashed against the shore with escalating ferocity as the tide increased by the minute. Each time the beach broke a wave another smashed into it. Slowly the water began creeping upward, inch by inch.

He sat on a rock, legs dangling, and watched all of this. His life had been miserable for a long time, today it had reached its climax. His boss had called him and handed him the pink slip, saying that the orders from above were to 'downsize' the company branch and they had unfortunately named him among the people to be fired. He said nothing and impassively walked away. He knew that no one else had been fired and that he had been chucked out so that the boss's son could join the company. He went straight to the shore, probably entertaining thoughts of drowning and ending his existence there and then.

Now he watched the ocean slowly winning its battle of ground supremacy. A crab scuttled away to higher ground to avoid the sea but was caught in a wave and got pulled back. It waited until the wave had receded and then made a dash for dry land, This time it succeeded, the waves only managing to wash away its trail.

A seagull suddenly dropped out of the sky and dived sharply into the sea, hunting for fishes. it came up a few seconds later, its beak empty. Undeterred, it started circling the area, its eyes focused downwards. In its third attempt, the seagull succeeded and the man watched the fish wriggling in its beak, slowly getting gulped down the seagull's throat.

The next time the seagull dived down, it came up with another fish, but this time the fish twisted and turned with all its might, finally managing to break its hold and flopped back into the sea.

He saw all this and noticed that Nature never gave up. The waves, the land, the crab, the seagull, the fish - all ceaselessly trying to achieve what they set out to do. Even if they did not succeed, they knew that if they kept fighting they would get another opportunity, and that was enough. He decided that he would also keep trying. He never liked his job anyway, so it was no big loss. He now had the chance to start all over again and was not going to let go of the chance. He silently thanked Nature, just as Nature had silently taught him a valuable lesson, and walked off with a spring in his step.

The sun finally set, but it set with dignity and a flaming farewell, as if it knew it was going to rise again at dawn and rule over the sky yet again.




This is an exact reproduction of a piece which was written sometime in Class XII. It started out as a random description writing exercise to pass time in a free period (hence the first paragraph) and developed into a proper prose piece. I didn't think too much of it right then, it was just another random piece of fiction I had come up with, and with a moral to boot. However, I found myself coming back to it in the next few weeks, mostly just reading it. I realised that I had written it subconsciously at some level to help me get through a really tough period. I had rarely showed such optimism in any of my stories, especially the ones I had written around the time. And it did give me the strength to go through a pretty hard time. It's not one of my best fiction pieces, the style is more juvenile than what I usually wrote, but it is very important to me and acted as a tremendous support. It also happens to be one of the very few times a written piece of mine got published (school magazine), so in that sense I'm pretty proud of it. I have reproduced it in a blogpost to remind me to always keep my chin up, and also as a promise to myself that I will get back to prose writing in the vacations, something which is long overdue.