The Little Birdie Who Beat Fear

One fine morning, right after the daily assembly rituals, the children and the staff at the SMTA school watched ‘Piper’, a 2016 short animated movie (IMDB, YouTube Teaser). This six-minute movie, with its highly realistic, vivid animation and without any spoken dialogue, showed the story of a little sandpiper bird. The baby bird is part of a flock of sandpipers who live by the sea shore. They are shown as running forth and hunting for food among the receding waves, and rushing backwards when the waves come in, this back and forth movement being the fulcrum of their existence. The protagonist- our little birdie, is initially reluctant to leave its nest and pleads its mother to continue feeding her. The wise mother gently encourages, pushes and prods her little one to leave the nest and face the waves. The baby yields but soon finds itself drenched by a huge wave.

This terrifying and traumatizing experience appears to have scarred it forever, as it heads back to camp itself in the nest. But a providential turn of events that involve the unlikely help of a family of hermit crabs, sees the baby bird once again at shore and drenched by a huge wave. But this time, in that brief moment of being drenched, a moment that contained the magic of all existence, the birdie opens its eyes and discovers a new submarine world, a new way of being, of exhaling under water. Lo and behold, the fear turned into joy, the little piper is no longer afraid of the waves. While the rest of the flock continue with their usual behaviour of retreating from the approaching waves, the little piper seemed to have gone beyond the collective behaviour of the rest of the group. Jumping, hopping, chirruping, it no longer retreats but meets gleefully the waves that had earlier seemed to be its nemesis and is soon able to gather food not just for itself but for the entire flock! 

Afterwards, we had a small discussion on topic of fear. The children seemed to be able to broadly make out and understand the theme of the movie. One class 5 student summed it up saying, “If I always run away from fear, I will never be able to drive it away.” The children seem to understand quickly, but do we adults do? 

We, the educators, parents, guardians, must examine the kind of environment we are providing our young ones with. Are our class rooms and homes free of all external fear? Are we able to encourage the little ones, like the wise sandpiper mother does, to venture forth through all their inner fears, in whatever they do and in the process have their own little ‘aha’ moments of magic? If not, then we still have work to do.