The Worm

The worm

The early bird catches the worm. Sounds familiar? Well, if you are a fan of phrases, idioms, quotes and what have you’s of English grammar then at some point in your life, you have often come across this cliché of an Idiom. I doubt if the current generation, especially teenagers have a glimpse of this, but since am not willing to bet, I’ll drop a little explanation.

This idiom has just one simple meaning, whoever arrives first, whoever wakes up and gets to his place of work early, will have the best chances of success. This is quite true, going by the dynamic rules of life and the constant laws of nature. Life will always favour you according to how first and fast you are. But let’s take a moment and reflect at the superficial meaning of my topic sentence in the first paragraph. The early bird will always catch the worm. That is how nature works. People have spent their entire lives talking about the early bird, so I chose to be a little odd and talk about the worm.

Life will reward the early bird for waking up early, which is a constant by Mother Nature. And it will reward it by a sumptuous dish of a moist worm slithering its slimy body between small rocks and damp grounds. Am writing from Middle East, and apparently, this is geographically a desert and I will forgive you for not knowing what a worm is. But since you are probably reading this from a computer or a browser in your phone, just open a new tab and Google the meaning of the word ‘worm’. I will be a little generous and offer you a brief explanation. A worm is a tubular invertebrate of the phylum annelid. Some technology oriented gurus will tell you it’s a computer virus, which I won’t dispute, but for as long as the world has existed, birds don’t eat computer viruses. So, you may want to stick to my meaning.

Away from the meaning and the explanations, I want to talk about the misfortunes of the worm. According to the rules of nature, the worm ought to be rewarded for its efforts of waking up earlier than the bird, because in my own understanding, the bird will only get the worm, because the worm hit a few steps before the bird, or is it a few slides? Since worms don’t have feet? Anyway, Nature does not favour the worm; it only talks about the bird. Don’t you think this worm has family, friends, and relationships? Well, as weird as it may sound, it is an animal, much as taxonomy and binomial nomenclature may make it quite insignificant in the hierarchy of life, it has freedom of association and that makes me want to talk about the misfortunes of the worm.

In the cold morning breeze before the unwavering rays of the morning sun, the worm is out, of course looking for means to survive, probably looking for ways of feeding its family and taking care of them. Then out of nowhere, a bird appears and murders this worm in cold blood, and in a split second, the worm ceases to become a worm and quickly becomes a dish. It’s quite unfortunate; its family will have to deal with an impromptu funeral that they won’t even know exists. Dad left home to look for breakfast, but unfortunately, it became somebody else’s breakfast. Reflect.

Life works in very funny ways, and the situation is not very different from the worm story. If you come back to real life, there are people who are the worms in my story above, and there are birds. There is a phrase that goes, ‘Man eats Man society’ that was coined by an American anthropologist, William Arens in his book, The Man Eating Myth.  You may have not heard about the book because it was published somewhere in 1979.

 

I am neither a lawyer, nor an activist. What I write here is purely based on my thoughts and perception of reality. But truth be told, this is a man-eat-man society, we have to deal with it. I would have said bird-eat-worm but my point has already been driven home. There are people who have to struggle their entire energy to keep the hustle up for their loved ones and in this case, their family members. I’ll substitute them with the worms. And there are those people who will have to live their lives off the edge of misfortunes they create from other people’s opportunities. In this scenario, you won’t be eaten alive as the case of the poor worm. But in the human situation, you will have to be nibbled bit by bit may be till your last day on earth, or may be till a situation changes.

I don’t know who really is a worm, and who really is a bird in this life, I can’t tell. But as a human being, you will be able to analyse by your own instincts who is the bird, and who is the worm. You might have been born a worm, that‘s natural. But as a human being, you have the ability to be something bigger than the worm. May be you can be a snake and eat the bird instead. It’s your choice. But my message goes out to all the ‘birds’ in our society. You may want to be a little passionate about this ‘worm’ and give it more opportunities to be something better, understand that the worm has family just like you and the worm loves them, that’s why it gets up quite early to fend for them. Be a little generous with the worm, and find other means of surviving. ‘Birds’ eat ‘grains’ and ‘seeds’. You may try and change your diet to something more reasonable and will not jeopardize the ‘worm’s’ existence.

And to the ‘worm’ out there, keep on waking up early, someday the ‘bird’ will wake up to catch you and find out that you are a ‘snake’ and instead, it will be the best breakfast you will ever have. . .