Most of the moral stories which we read often had a very definite moral - Do this or don't do this. Don't be greedy, don't lie, work hard etc etc.
However, the story of the fox and the grapes has no such definite moral. The fox tried and tried to get hold of the grapes and when he did not, he said the grapes are sour and left.
I often wondered, what did the author want to say? Was the fox right in his action? Growing up, I was very sure the fox was a failure , a "sore loser" - and that is not what we should be.
But as life unfolds, we often see things with a different perspective. This story recently came back to me and I started to think, well why was the fox wrong? The story did say he tried a lot.
Given that the story is about a fox which is generally considered a clever animal, I started to see another side to this story. May be the fox was indeed clever at giving up and making peace with it by blaming it on the grapes. May be this story needed some unfolding to do.
When we put a lot of efforts into something without a favourable result, it is very difficult to decide when to let it go. Because letting go is same as - giving up, admitting failure.
Blame it on the physiological or psychological functions of our "evolved" brain, but failures trigger some kind of existential crisis for us. We try to rationalise our failure - probably to safeguard ourselves from future events , or may be to evolve further in our life.
For this, we start a personal interrogation with the questions ranging from - Am I a failure to what should I do next? Somewhere while travelling in this range, we stop beating ourselves about the fact that we gave up and start accepting it. Sometimes we accept by thinking of where we could improve . But I feel that accepting failure happily means to just say - Eh! it was not worth it . Or in other words - grapes are sour .
So I unlearnt that being a sore loser is not all that bad. Sometime one needs to be a sore loser to close a chapter and start with new beginnings.
The real question to be answered then is - when to give up the fight? I feel it is solely driven by the need and passion of a person.
After all, if we have to go by stories it was the ant who never gave up and hence could climb the wall. But that one for another day!
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