Life is like race between cat & rat. But rat mostly wins because cat runs for food rat runs for life. Always remember purpose is more important then need.Good morningFila1#NyameNeHene
My colleague received the above message on whatsapp early one morning (note, its verbatim). She didn’t get it and initially, neither did I. I understood the general direction the writer was coming from- but I didn’t think the point was made. After a short discussion we had, we agreed on these three things:
Cats chase rats – they don’t race them.
Life IS a race…but it’s not a competition
The concluding sentence didn’t make sense.
I tend to overthink the tinniest things to see how much wisdom I can learn from it- so I was pleased when days afterwards, this life-being-a-race thing came back to mind and unfolded in different ways.
While a cat and a rat may not be racing each other to get to a finish line, they’re trying to out-run each other… in that vein, it makes a lot of sense to say, “life is like a race between a cat and a rat”. It may not have been the best analogy, but long after I had brushed it off as useless, it sunk in – the message was delivered.
Everyone is running a race – we are each running towards different finish lines. In the whatsapp message, the rat was running towards safety and the cat was running towards lunch/breakfast/dinner. It is safe to say in the real world, we are racing against time because the competition is in making sure we can accomplish our purpose before our time on the race track comes to an end.
I was very excited when I started thinking about the whatsapp message this way. My initial thought about it was, why would you deliver such confusion on a beautiful morning. The message wasn’t structured properly, but they still managed to introduce all the necessary things. There was 1. Good Morning(🤣), 2. Race and 3. Purpose. The latter part where it says, ‘purpose is more important than need’ still baffles me. What exactly does that mean? Wouldn’t I need to have satisfied needs to effectively fulfill my purpose?🤷🏾♀️I don’t know the answers to these. If you do, please help me understand in the comment section below. (thankyou 🤗)
When I was meditating on this, I went ahead to think about how life’s different seasons bring different situations and I immediately imagined a hurdle race. I don’t know much about rules of the race track, but I don’t think it’s possible to win a race without jumping (or at least) attempting to jump over ALL the hurdles on your track. Is it? Well even if it is, imagine in this case that it’s not possible. (😝) You simply will not be given a reward at finish line if you walked around the hurdle instead of jumping over it. Similarly, if we are not able to get or do our best in every season of our lives, it won’t cut it when you get to your life’s finish line. I’m certain everyone wants to be told ‘you have run a good race’.
The issue about running a perfect race is, it is only possible when you have had adequate training before the race. Life, however, is an on-the-job training – so you never get it perfect at once- but there is the ability to improve and get better. We have all sorts of obstacles to jump and so many learning curves that are divinely placed to form character in us, build us up and make us stronger to finish the race set before us. If we ever have a detour or miss our track route, issorai… only if we make it back in time to finish well.