Rabbits are very shy creatures. It only takes a little rustle for them to run away scared into safety. Sometimes even their own shadow scares them. They are afraid of being eaten or hunted by a hunter.
“Hey, buddy,” Tony the rabbit once said to his mate. “I’m tired of being scared all the time.”
“So am I,” agreed Emile. “But what can we do not to be scared all the time?”
“That’s easy, we just stay put and don’t worry about getting eaten.”
But then the rabbits heard a noise, forgot what they had said a moment before, and ran away. On their way they ran past a pond where a family of frogs was sitting on the edge in the reeds.
When the frogs spotted the running rabbits, they were frightened and immediately sought safety. One jumped into the water, another covered itself with a leaf, and the other three tried to bury themselves in the mud so they couldn’t be seen.
The rabbits stopped.
“Emile, look,” said Tony the hare, pointing with his head in the direction where the frogs, hiding in fear, were trembling.
“Oh yeah,” Emile nodded, staring at the frogs’ toes poking out of the mud. “Looks like we’re not such cowards afterall.”
“That’s exactly what I think, too. There are other animals that are even afraid of us! Well, could you believe that? Here we are despairing all the time about how scared we are, and yet there are animals that are far more scared than we are.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Emil nodded. “There’s always someone who’s worse off.”
And so the rabbits stopped being unhappy about always running from something. They weren’t even worried about anything the forest had in store for them. Because now they knew that even when some things weren’t great, there was always someone who was worse off.
