What a wanderer could wonder about...

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Run run Rudolph, Reeling like a merry-go-round

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle awakens knowing that it must run faster than the fastest lion in order to survive. Every morning a lion awakens knowing that it must run faster than the slowest gazelle in order to survive.

It makes no difference whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun rises, you must run or you will die. This is the race of life...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was very beautiful. The race of life... Though it is a long time I am not in any contest and I am trying to believe that if there is any race, it is inside me between the things I desire and my capabilities feeling that all other races around are just made by human mind and makes the world more superficial...But actually in some levels of human life, we are like animals, trying to get the better job, the better opportunity, more food and better accommodation and we cannot survive from the primary necessities of life if we are too weak weak...That's sad but real...

yzt said...

If I remember correctly, in "Through the Looking-Glass," Alice is told by the queen of red that she has to run as fast as she can just to remain in her current place. And if she she slows down, she'd fall behind in the race and lose her position.
I think there's a phenomenon called the "Red Queen" (Bless Wikipedia! Here's the link.) which is similar to or the same as what you describe here.
Sorry for being so unpoetic!

bme said...

To yzt: Unfortunately I haven't read the "Through the Looking-Glass", I should really read it sometimes. "Alice in the Wonderland" is one of my all time favorites though. Thanks for the interesting pointers and links.

Something that might be complete irrelevant to this topic, but your mentioning the "Red Queen Phenomenon" reminded me of another interesting thing I saw while I was setting the Wikipedia link to gazelle. They exhibit an interesting behaviour of stotting (running slowly and jumping high before fleeing), which is used as an evidence of "Handicap principle". Some interesting theories for explaining the behaviors are mentioned here, like signaling game model of the game theory bunch.

bme said...

To Yeganeh: I somehow agree that it is all in our mind. In other words, "There is no spoon."

Anonymous said...

But I don't agree...
Life is a marathon, not a sprint!
And sometimes you need to stay a while and look around carefully. There are lots of thing to ponder about and there are lots of thing for you to enjoy life. If you run so fast you never notice what's happening around you or at least you don't care after a while, because you are always in a rush and it is always late!
I don't like to live mu=y life being worry about every moment of it. As you yourself wrote the other day: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans"
So stop being worried, and embrace more of life.