Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. A baby giraffe
falls 10 feet from its mother's womb and usually lands on its back. Within
seconds it rolls over and tucks its legs under its body. From this
position it considers the world for the first time and shakes off the last
vestiges of the birthing fluid from its eyes and ears. Then the mother
giraffe rudely introduces its offspring to the reality of life.
In his book, A View from the Zoo, Gary Richmond describes how a
newborn giraffe learns its first lesson.
The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick
look. Then she positions herself directly over her calf. She waits for
about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She swings
her long, pendulous leg outward and kicks her baby, so that it is sent
sprawling head over heels.
When it doesn't get up, the violent process is repeated over and
over again. The struggle to rise is momentous. As the baby calf grows
tired, the mother kicks it again to stimulate its efforts. Finally, the
calf stands for the first time on its wobbly legs.
Then the mother giraffe does the most remarkable thing. She kicks
it off its feet again. Why? She wants it to remember how it got up. In the
wild, baby giraffes must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay
with the herd, where there is safety. Lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild
hunting dogs all enjoy young giraffes, and they'd get it too, if the
mother didn't teach her calf to get up quickly and get with it.
The late Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying
greatness, writing novelized biographies of such men as Michelangelo,
Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.
Stone was once asked if he had found a thread that runs through the
lives of all these exceptional people. He said, "I write about people who
sometime in their life have a vision or dream of something that should be
accomplished and they go to work.
"They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for
years they get nowhere. But every time they're knocked down they stand up.
You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they've
accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do."
