The Hare and the Tortoise Retold

 

I dedicate the moral of this story to my dear brother-in- law:

This year 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit according to the Chinese zodiac of the 12 animals.

I happened to belong to the rabbit. The rabbit and the hare belong to the same Leporidae family though different species.  

Aesop was a Greek fabulist, who lived around the time of 620 to 560 B.C.E. He wrote numerous fables collectively known as Aesop’s fables.  One of them was about the hare and the tortoise from which arises the proverb “slow and steady wins the race”.

I have a brother-in-law by the name of Ong Geok Soo who is a senior structural engineer in Singapore.

Whenever I wrote anything on astronomy, the universe, origin and evolution of life, on the soul and the body, on the existence of ghost, anything spiritual or about new heavens and earth as predicted in the Bible in this blog or elsewhere, or on any subjects he could not understand and beyond him, he would write about dark matter and dark energy that I could not understand.

After he wrote a lot of rubbish to me, he would call himself a confused mountain tortoise who would then retreat up a mountain into a monastery to meditate to relax his mind up there.

There he calls himself a mountain tortoise trying to understand what I was trying to write and explain.

Today, in this year of the hare, I dedicate the moral of this story to my dear brother-in-law Ong Geok Soo.

It is like this:

The tortoise and the hare went on a race to heaven. The ever-confident hare went to sleep halfway.
On seeing this, the tortoise decided to go up his mountain monastery to meditate there, in the self-assured belief the hare will take a long time to sleep down below.

Sure, the hare took a very long time, but finally woke up to learn he was late. The hare ran like mad to heaven. But the tortoise took even a longer time to meditate all the hare wrote to understand. The tortoise never made it to heaven

The moral of the story is, “it is far better to sleep than to meditate”.  Only after the long sleep do we have the wisdom and energy to run fast to complete the race.

Hence it is not “slow and steady wins the race” as Aesop wished to tell  

Good Afternoon to all my gentle readers. The hare has just woken up from his long afternoon sleep to write.