Cheetah Lessons...

Mysore Zoo has a Cheetah. I saw it during my visit to the zoo yesterday.

There it was, sitting silently in its  10 meter by 10 meter cage. Looking at the Cheetah, sitting silently, with all these stupid people watching it, I just wondered if the Cheetah knew its strengths.

Did it know that it is the fastest land animal in the world?

Does it know that its siblings in African Jungles are lording over the jungle?

Does it know that most of the other animals are scared of it? 

Does it know what it is capable?

Seeing that Cheetah, sitting in a small cage, I felt utterly, desperately melancholic....

How could man capture a royal animal that should belong to the African Jungles, bring it and put it up in a tiny cage and allow all these morons to ogle at it from a safety of the banisters? That animal is meant to be living in jungles, hunting and preying on animals and run faster than any other land animal.

Instead, what is it doing in a small cage in some zoo in South India?

Suddenly I realized that what is happening to that Cheetah is happening to most of us.

Very often we build cages around us. The cages could be simple as our mental blocks or more complex as the expectations of people around us. The cages may be the misjudged comments made by people whom we trust, or they may be lack of trust in our abilities demonstrated by a significant person in our lives. The cage may be our fear of failure, it may be our fear of success, or it may be our lack of self-belief.

Whatever may the self-created cage be, many of us are like that Cheetah. Possessing tremendous potential, but allow us to be caged by external factors, over which, we feel we do not have any control to change. 

Unlike that Cheetah, we can take action to come out of the cage and unleash our potential. We have the power to break those cages and have faith in our abilities. 

The problem for many of us is that we do not even know our potential.  We simply sit in our cages and wallow in self pity for our incompetence, while the truth is that we are highly capable to achieve anything we set out to do. 

So, go get out and take action. Take some steps to ensure that you unleash your full potential...

Go ahead and.... 

....write the book that you have been planning all along..

....Design the database that you have been postponing.

....Repair the kitchen drawer like you always wanted to
....Do something, anything.

Don't be like that Cheetah. Don't sit idle and hope for things to happen. Take some steps now.

Here is a scary thought.
What if that Cheetah never gets any opportunity to realize its strengths? What if that animal is condemned to spend the whole life in that 10*10 cage never realizing what could have been. 

What if we never realize our capability and go thru the motions day after day, month after month, year after year. What if we never realize that if we had wanted, we could have changed the world....

That is scary.