Bat Flight

A bat got trapped in my room and taught me the importance of staying right where I am

Once I went to a place called Araku Valley. Araku is a verdant hill station, three hours away from Visakhapatnam in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Although I was in a beautiful place, I did not do much travelling and mostly stayed in my hotel. There was a week’s worth of writing to be done for a project, which meant that I could only enjoy the beauty of the place, immobilized with my laptop. An interesting incident happened at the hotel, which I want to share with you. In the morning, I usually prefer to do some sadhana outdoors. Journal a little, sit silently, or do yoga. But, this morning, it was drizzling outside, and so I remained within the room itself. To let the outdoors in, I opened the door and positioned my yoga mat close to. The lights of the room were switched off and in the light of the candle I was writing in my journal. Attracted to the light of the fire, sometimes insects wander into the room. But, today, it was not just insects, a new creature had entered the room. It was a baby bat! Small, restless and shifty. I don’t think it wanted to enter the room, but unfortunately it did. Now, the thing with bats is that they like flying in circles. And true to its nature, it just kept flying in circles without stopping.

There was only one entrance to the room, which is where he had entered the place. There was also a window on the opposite side, but it had a grill on it, and so he could not go out through it. Had the window been open, he could have escaped from there. After about five minutes of watching it do this, I thought that since it is unable to find a way out by itself, maybe it needs some assistance. I tried catching it with my towel. I threw the towel in its direction, the way a hunter would throw his net over a wild beast. Once, twice, thrice, all three times I missed. It was flying too fast. Where before it was trying to get out of the room, now it felt like it was enjoying the process of dodging me. It is six in the morning, there is a bat flailing in my room and me flailing after it. I tried the same with a bigger quilt, but was unsuccessful in catching it. Several minutes passed. I thought that I should let it lose energy. It will come to a halt on its own, and then I can pick it up and place it outside the room. The bat continued flying resolutely, but I could see it was losing strength. Where before it was tracing grand high-flying ellipses, now the circles it was tracing were feeble and rickety. Now it was flying closer to the ground, even going under the metal frame of the bed many times. In the end, my attempts to catch it or hit it with the towel succeeded, and it hit the ground just outside the room. It scared me a little, because I thought the impact may have killed it, but after a few seconds it revived and flew away into the freedom of the outside world.

After the bat was gone, I realized that it had come into my life at the perfect time, and I could learn something from this. The lesson in this incident touched me. Often in life, we are like this bat. When we are in an uncomfortable situation, unsure of how to come out of it, we flail about restlessly, just like the bat. Rarely do we ever wait it out or let ourselves be helped. Our response is always that of doing something, rather than of being. Is it possible that what I was to the bat, there might be forces greater than us, higher than us, wishing to help us out? If there is such a higher being around who wants to come to our help, they cannot do so because of how fast we are moving. We keep running around restlessly and miss out on the help. In the end, it has to shut us down or put a calamitous stop to the running, like my towel hit for the bat, to get us to where we’re meant to be. After this incident, I was more willing to resist the temptation to flap around and expend my energy and instead stay where I was in a situation with the trust that I will be helped right where I am.