Lizard the Guru

Serendipity seems to have an undying relationship with life. The best and the worst things invade us in the least expected moments, making us shocked, pleasantly and unpleasantly.

Let me tell you something about such an ordinary incident which left an imprint on my mind extraordinarily. I had just returned from my college after a deadly series of classes which had the potential of the making the most hardened insomniac go dead sleep. It was a summer noon, and I was taking rest in my room, curled up in my bed, trying to sleep. But the ability to nod off was light years away from me as I had finished most of my sleep in the last bench of my class, the best place to protect oneself from government’s unfriendly education policy.

After some exercise in tossing and turning, I became static, and my wandering eyes locked on a small, brown lizard taking rest on the front wall. It was so passive that I felt it had fallen asleep. I got jealous of him. Hell, he can nod off standing on a vertical wall, and here’s me, unable to catch 40 winks even on a four inches high mattress. Then my eyes shot off for another creature, an insect sitting on the other wall, nearly two meters away from its enemy. A passing thought came to me: the lizard is planning to have that insect for his lunch. No way, I thought. The lizard can never catch the insect. It’s so far. Besides, the insect can fly at the smallest sign of danger which his predator can’t. Well, after a while that small, unassuming reptile proved me dead wrong.

It was so clearly visible to me. The lizard had his eyes Fevicoled on the victim. Slowly, making sure the poor chap got no hint, he took a few steps in a slightly off direction where his meal was carelessly sitting. Then he took rest for a couple of minutes. Again when he made sure that his morsel was lost in his own thoughts, he inched forward, step by step. Gosh! I was even more tense than the reptile might have been, anticipating each and every second that the insect might fly off.

What I saw afterwards was a classic case of patience and cool. The lizard kept coming near to him in the same way. He took more than twenty minutes to complete the 80% of the journey. Even the slightest carelessness on his part might have snatched the food away from his mouth. The remaining 20% of distance was like walking on a thread. Chances of the insect getting warned were at the optimum, and the lizard was resting for around 4-5 minutes before taking the next step each time. Now he was quite near to his dish, but I felt he still needed 6-7 steps to take the first bite. Then what I saw was so different from what I had been seeing so far. That lazy, patient and passive lizard jumped (it looked more like a flight) and had its toothless mouth wrapped around the poor insect in a fraction of second without even letting him know what hit him.

I don’t want to go into the details of how he ate, chewed and swallowed his delicious win. But he taught me a few things I’d have hardly learnt anywhere else. First, have patience and you can have anything. Second, keep your calm but let your mind work like hell. Third, you need to be more careful when nearer to the goal. Fourth, use your capability according to the need of moment whether it’s waiting like a corpse or moving forward like lightening.

And, last but the most important, you can learn things from anything and anybody. Keep your eyes open. This world is a great school, and even the most insignificant incident may turn out to be the most significant lesson of your life. Just like it happened in the lizard’s case. Amen!