To My Magnificent Fellow Life Travelers:
The Moth and the Star is a fable written by the great American humorist James Thurber (1894 – 1961). It was originally published in the story collection Fables for Our Time published in 1940.
A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star. He told his mother about this, and she counseled him to set his heart on a bridge lamp instead. “Stars aren’t the thing to hang around,” she said; “lamps are the thing to hang around.” “You get somewhere that way,” said the moth’s father. “You don’t get anywhere chasing stars.”
But the moth would not heed the words of either parent. Every evening at dusk when the star came out, he would start flying toward it and every morning at dawn he would crawl back home worn out with his vain endeavor.
One day his father said to him, “You haven’t burned a wing in months, boy, and it looks to me as if you were never going to. All your brothers have been badly burned flying around streetlamps and all your sisters have been terribly singed flying around house lamps. Come on, now, get yourself scorched! A big strapping moth like you without a mark on him!”
The moth left his father’s house, but he would not fly around streetlamps, and he would not fly around house lamps. He went right on trying to reach the star, which was four and one-third light years, or twenty-five trillion miles, away. The moth thought it was just caught in the top branches of an elm.
He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the stars, and he went around saying so. This gave him a deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.
Moral: He who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.
I recall first reading this Thurber fable in a freshman high school English class. What I took away from the tale was that being different is not something bad and that your dreams are most important in shaping the outcome and quality of your life. Now, some sixty years later, my take on this story hasn’t changed much. To achieve you must perceive. You must be hungry; hungry for success; hungry for victory and hungry simply to become the best that you can be. But it always starts with a dream.
Once you have a dream in life that takes a lot of energy, that requires a lot of work, that incurs a great deal of interest and that is a challenge to you, you will always look forward to waking up to see what the new day brings. If you are going to achieve anything in life, you must aim at it. And, if you’re going to aim at anything, why not the stars?
It is in your desire, determination, and dedication to the pursuit of a dream that you achieve “deep and lasting pleasure,” whether or not the dream is actually realized.
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. –Steve Jobs
Have an AWE-full Weekend!
William “Bill” Bacque’