Focus on What’s Important in Life

 “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light” – Aristotle.

A beautiful story of a pregnant deer is told:

In a forest, a pregnant deer is about to give birth. She finds a remote grass field near a strong-flowing river. This seems a safe place for her.

Suddenly labour pains begin. At the same moment, dark clouds gather, and lightning starts a forest fire. She looks on her left side and sees a hunter with his bow extended pointing at her. To her right, she spots a hungry lion approaching her. What can the pregnant deer do? She is in labour! What will happen? Will the deer survive? Or will she give birth to a fawn? Will the fawn survive? Or will everything be burnt by the forest fire? Will she perish to the hunter’s arrows? Will she die a horrible death at the hands of a hungry lion approaching her?

She is constrained by the fire on one side and the flowing river on the other side and boxed in by her natural predators. What does she do? She focuses on giving birth to a new life.

The sequence of the events that follows are:

• Lightning strikes and blinds the hunter.
• The hunter releases the arrow which zips past the deer and strikes the hungry lion.
• It starts raining heavily and the forest fire is slowly doused by the rain.
• The deer gives birth to a healthy fawn.

In our own lives, we too are faced with daily moments of choice. In some cases, the choice is easy to make. However, it becomes a bit complex to make a choice when confronted on all sides of life with negative thinking and complicated or risky scenarios. Some negative thoughts can be overwhelming and we end up not choosing well.

Maybe we can learn from the deer. The priority of the deer, at that moment, was simply to give birth to a baby. The rest was not in her hands and any action or reaction that changed her focus would have likely resulted in death or disaster.

One writer once said, “Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfilment of their goals, rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.

So, like the pregnant deer, stay focused on what is important in life. Our priorities should help us make the right choices when faced with the complexity of life.