We won’t blow away in the wind
It’s been a very busy week this week preparing for the launch of Wingman Wheels – our mobile lounge fundraising campaign which went live on Thursday. It’s amazing to see the enormous amount of work that goes in to something like this – it’s not just a case of sticking a video on YouTube and asking for money….there is a business plan, and due diligence, and terms and conditions, and creating order to the amazing generosity shown to us by so many companies and individuals who have donated experiences which we can use as rewards. It’s a whole new world for all of us almost every day and I think it’s fair to say that over the last 9 months all of us who are involved in Project Wingman have learned so much and definitely added strings to our bows. (You can find out more about this by visiting http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/wingmanwheels)
In amongst the meetings and phone calls ans emails which have dominated these last couple of weeks, our little patch of heaven on the Moray Riviera (as I like to call it) has been blessed with some glorious weather and I have been reminded on several occasions of one of my favourite stories.
One of the things that stand out from my childhood is that we always had books to read and one of my favourites was a compendium (remember those?!) of Aesop’s Fables. Aesop it turns out was a Greek slave and storyteller who lived 2500 years ago and his stories have survived to become Childrens favourites like “The Tortoise and the Hare”, “The Lion and the Mouse” and “The Boy who cried Wolf”. Fables are just stories that were told to make a moral point and I have discovered that there are 725 of these accredited to Aesop. Look them up some time and you will find some tales that you didn’t even realise came from this fantastic cornucopia of fiction!!
My favourite of these fables is “The North Wind and The Sun”. The North Wind boasts to the Sun about its great strength whilst the Sun argues that there is more power in gentleness. They decide to have a competition and spy a man travelling along a road wearing a winter coat. The challenge is to get the man to remove his coat and the North Wind goes first claiming that it will be easy as it will just blow the coat off the man. Blowing as hard as it has ever blown before and making the trees bend and the earth fill with dust, the North Wind tries thinks it’s in the bag, but the more the wind blows, the more the man wraps his coat tightly around him.
Next it is the turn of the Sun which simply pops out from behind a cloud and shines, warming the earth and the man, who heats up and takes off his coat. Eventually he warms up so much he lays down beneath the shade of a tree. The Sun has won and explains to the North Wind that “through gentleness I got my way”
I love this story so much and every time I am working in the garden or walking on the beach and the sun comes out and makes me take off my coat I think of this tale.
It strikes me that there is a lot of North Wind around sometimes and never more so than now – and we need to make sure we have our coats wrapped tightly around us and we keep going despite it all, for as surely as day follows night, the Sun WILL come out – in fact it’s already coming out because if you look for them, rays of hope and light are everywhere around us.
The point of this story is that it’s through strength and not force that we achieve the toughest challenges, whether it’s calmly awaiting vote recounts in a Presidential election, or working out what comes next in life when the thing you have done for years is no longer an option. The strength of character we are all developing as a result of the crisis that has been forced on us will keep us going long beyond these turbulent times – and if we all carry each other through it, we end up even stronger and being able to achieve things we might never have thought possible before.
