“The comeback is always greater than the setback.” -u.fo Twitter
When my eldest son was a little boy, he found the story of The Ugly Duckling to be so upsetting. He’d want to skip right past the depressing childhood (“ducklinghood”??) of the poor little guy to the part where the young “ugly duckling” became the majestic, beautiful, elegant swan that was more fabulous than all of the other ducks in the pond. I was reminded of this memory when I recently read about Qizai, the only known brown panda in the world.
Supposedly, Qizai, the brown panda, was abandoned by his mother when he was only two months old and he was horribly bullied by the other pandas when he was a cub. Now, even though other brown pandas have been spotted in the past, Qizai is so rare that he is considered to be the only known brown panda alive and he is one of China’s national treasures. Qizai has all of the bamboo he could ever want to eat, his own special enclosure and a keeper devoted only to him. China has even found him a special mate so that they can study the genetics of his offspring. Despite his initial hardships, Qizai lives the life other pandas could only dream about. The best part of the story is that Qizai’s nature and demeanor has always been uniquely sweet and that has never changed.
I was only in my twenties when I would read to my son the story of The Ugly Duckling, but even then, I had enough life experience under my belt, to experience first hand that if you hold on and keep the faith, fortunes always change. I wanted to reassure him of that, but usually the best reassurances come from our own actual experiences. That’s the hard part of parenting. You want to take all of the “licks” for your kids, but if you do that, you don’t let them experience how sweet the rewards can be, after being knocked down a time or two. You rob them of some of the greatest validations in life – resiliency and the redemption that comes from that resiliency.
“It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula