There was once a little sparrow who lived in a nest in a mango tree.
Her name was Chiru.
All her brothers and sisters had learned to fly. One by one they had jumped from the nest, flapped their wings, and gone up into the sky. It looked easy when they did it.
Chiru sat at the edge of the nest and looked down.
It was very far to the ground.
She went back to the middle of the nest and stayed there.
Every morning her mother came with food.
"Today?" her mother would ask.
"Tomorrow," Chiru would say.
This went on for several days.
One afternoon a strong wind came through the mango tree. It shook the branches and rattled the leaves and before Chiru could move back to the centre, it lifted her right out of the nest.
She fell.
And then - without deciding to, without thinking about it at all - her wings opened.
She flew.
Not gracefully. Not in a straight line. She wobbled and dipped and came down in a bush three trees away. But she came down flying, not falling.
She sat in the bush for a moment, breathing hard.
Then she looked up at the sky. It was very large. Much larger than it looked from the nest.
She flew back to the mango tree - a little better this time, a little more steady.
Her mother was waiting on a branch.
"Tomorrow," her mother said, smiling.
"Today," said Chiru.
Sometimes we do not jump until we are pushed.
That is all right.
Because once we fly - we never forget that we can.
