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"WISDOM" Many moons ago, in a land far away from the well known cities of Buya and Kugnae, there was a Kingdom in great despair. The long summer season had brought a drought to the already arid lands and left the realm desolate and barren. The Kingdom's remaining water supply was nearly deplete. Knowing his people were facing starvation and dehydration, the King of the realm desperately called upon his remaining subjects. The King called, his few remaining loyal subjects answered. The general of his army, his Royal Engineer, and the Jester. As the King revealed to them the plight that their Kingdom faced, he informed his subjects of the quest that they had been summoned to complete. In the Kingdom's ancient history, there had been severe droughts before. An ancient King had commissioned a great well to be dug to nourish his people in great times of need. The ancient well was dug profoundly deep. Because of the reservoir's depth, the water was out of reach of the current King. The subjects were given the task of recovering the water from the reservoir for the Kingdom. Hastily, the General was the first to accept the challenge. With a booming voice, the General commanded his soldiers to dig a new tunnel to access the lower part of the well. Without question, the soldiers began their tiring work with picks and shovels. The ground around the well was solid rock. The soldier's progress on the tunnel was slow and very uncoordinated. Casualties amounted as dehydration, heat stroke and cave-ins were common. As the General depleted his resources, work stopped on the tunnel. A great distance the soldiers had achieved, but the water in the reservoir was still out of reach. After the General's tunnel failed, the Engineer spent his time collecting rope from all corners of the realm. The engineer fashioned all of the pieces of rope together into a rope so extraordinarily long, he claimed that he could lasso the moon and pull it from the heavens down to earth. However, as the Engineer made it to the bottom of the General's tunnel to the lower part of the well, he lowered a bucket with his rope deep into the well. So far down the well the bucket went, but it never reached water. Like the General, the Engineer failed his King. Finally, the Jester had observed both the General and the Engineer pursuing their quest and fail. The Jester thought about how the General tried to bring the Kingdom down to the water and how the Engineer tried to bring the water up to the Kingdom. For some time he thought about it. The Jester recalled as a child, he onced observe a crow trying to drink from a container of water. The water was out of the crow's reach. However, the crow carefully placed pebbles into the container. Slowly, the crow used water displacement to raise the water level inside the container. Finally, the crow was able to drink from the container. The Jester went to the well, he knew he had plenty of rock that had been excavated for the tunnels. To avoid scrutiny, the Jester waited until nightfall to place the excavated rock into the well. Each stone and pebble the Jester dropped, it tumbled and fell down the deep well ending with a distant "SPLASH!". With every stone the Jester dropped, the water level slowly rose. Eventually, the water had rose far enough the Jester was able to venture to the bottom of the General's tunnel, lower the Engineer's rope and bucket, and recover the water. The kingdom was saved! The king celebrated the Jesters success. The King asked the Jester, how he was able to come up with such a plan, having little education and study. The Jester replied, "It is true, I am not an intelligent man. However, I know that what a person learns in life is a measure of their intelligence. What a person does with their intelligence and knowing when to use it, that is wisdom." -Tibun | |