The Red Panda and the Height
Curiosity does not always find what it expects.
Sometimes it finds a reason to keep climbing.
One morning, a young red panda was eating bamboo beneath a tall old tree when something caught his eye.
High above him, among the leaves, hung a small reddish shape.
He tilted his head.
It looked like a fruit.
Not a fruit he knew, certainly, but perhaps that only made it better.
The red panda walked around the trunk, looking up from every angle.
“What are you staring at?” asked a squirrel.
“A fruit.”
The squirrel squinted.
“That could be anything.”
“Exactly,” said the red panda.
And he began to climb.
The first branch was higher than it had seemed from the ground.
He stretched.
Missed.
Tried again.
His hind paws slipped against the bark, and for a moment he found himself clinging awkwardly to the trunk while the squirrel watched from below.
“You could simply leave it alone,” she called.
“I could,” he replied, pulling himself onto the branch.
He did not.
The second branch required a little jump.
The third taught him that some patches of bark were easier to grip than others.
By the fourth, he had discovered how much his tail could help him balance.
At the fifth, he stopped looking down before every leap.
The strange red thing remained above him.
Sometimes a breeze hid it behind the leaves. Sometimes sunlight made it glow so brightly that he became certain it must be delicious.
Up he went.
He crossed thin branches, worked his way around a knot in the trunk, and learned to test each limb before trusting his weight to it.
Once he chose the wrong branch and had to climb back.
He did not mind.
There was always another way.
Near the top he reached the widest gap yet.
That morning, he would have stared at it for a very long time.
Now he merely studied the distance.
He shifted his paws.
Balanced his tail.
Took one deep breath.
And jumped.
He landed neatly.
The red panda blinked.
“That was easier than the first branch,” he murmured.
At last he reached the reddish object.
He pushed aside the leaves and stared.
It was not a fruit.
It was a dry little seedpod.
The red panda turned it between his paws.
Far below, the squirrel called:
“Well?”
“It’s a seedpod!”
There was a pause.
“You climbed all that way for a seedpod?”
The red panda looked down.
He could see the bamboo patch where he had begun, the branches he had struggled over, the places where he had slipped and tried again. Beyond them lay parts of the forest he had never seen from the ground.
He thought of the difficult first branch.
Then of the final leap.
And of every strange, delightful bit in between.
He laughed.
“No,” he called. “I climbed because I wanted to know.”
“And was it worth it?”
The red panda tucked the seedpod behind one ear and began choosing a new way down.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I liked the climbing.”
Moral
Curiosity may begin with what waits at the end, but there is no loss in the search when we learn, grow, and enjoy the way there.
