The bird that needed a long wind

In the far north there's a fish called Kun, so large nobody knows how many thousand miles it measures. It turns into a bird called Peng, and its back is just as wide. When it rises, its wings are like clouds hanging from the sky.

When the sea moves, this bird heads for the southern darkness. It beats the water for three thousand miles, then spirals up ninety thousand miles, on a wind six months long.

Some small birds laughed at this. A cicada and a fledgling dove said: we do our best. We fly up to the elm tree and come back down, and sometimes we don't make it and land on the ground. Why would anyone go ninety thousand miles?

The two little birds, Zhuangzi says, were not wrong. They simply ran on a different scale.

What I take from it has nothing to do with ambition. It's about the wind. The Peng couldn't fly anywhere until six months of weather had built up under it. It didn't flap harder. It waited, for the thing that only comes when the season is right.

If you've been trying to leave the elm tree by flapping, that's worth knowing. Some departures need to be waited for, not forced.

MOJOWAY is where I check the weather instead of blaming my wings. Growth, in practice, is mostly a matter of getting the timing of your own readiness right.