The Afterlife Of The Ugly Duckling

 I always loved the story of The Ugly Duckling. This young misfit had a terrible childhood, visibly and

unaccountably different from his brothers and sisters, and was commented on and pecked at by

everyone in the farmyard, including his own mother.

Driven by their unkindness from his home, he found similar experiences of cruelty and hostility in his

encounters in the outside world, with various farmers and other animals, whose scant kindness he

solicited, in desperation and hope.

Each cumulatively escalating experience of exclusion made him progressively disheartened, until he

gave up on having any kind of fulfilment at all, and stopped seeking shelter, even in the bitter winter,

which nearly killed him, with its extreme conditions. Hans Christian Andersen's description is

heartbreaking.

In that bleak midwinter, he expected to die. But somehow, in those subzero conditions both of weather

and of vitality, he survived to see the first signs of spring coming: The increasing warmth of the sun, the

dissolving of the snow, the frost and ice, the blossoming of flowers, and the blooming of the green

grass.

It is a great moment in the story when, as the ice on the lake has melted, he is able to swim a little way,

and sees a group of stately swans on the other side of the lake, across from him. He admires them

from afar, feeling them so far removed from his state of loveliness and ugliness. His early experiences

of rejection and humiliation have made him feel unworthy to even gaze at them.

Much to his horrified surprise, they swim across to greet him. Expecting to be scolded or even attacked,

he waits in passive terror for damage that never comes. The swans embrace him with affection and

respect, and show him his reflection in the pure and brimming waters of the lake: He is not a duckling,

and he is not even an ugly, full-grown duck. He is a swan, the most graceful and beautiful of birds.

And there the story ends. But... his true life begins! I have always thought that after the first shock and

amazement, he must have felt like he was in heaven.

And looking back, he would have realised that everything harsh that had happened to him had nothing

to do with his true value or worth. He had simply been wrongly characterised at the start, and identified

and judged by the wrong group. The true experiences he now would have would be directed rightly, at

the real individual he actually is, in the right place and at the right time.

I think it must have been for him, at that radiant point of transformation, like it is for spiritual people

who renounce their former identities and all the experiences that had gone with them. All the suffering

he had endured would fade in significance, because it was now ended, and would never recur. The only

part of it left would reside in his memory, which would contrast its grief with the brilliant joy that he

now experienced daily in the life he came into.

From sadness to joy, from winter to spring, from death to resurrection, from despair to hope, from

loneliness to joyful connection: It is a tale of endurance and of longed-for reward, which is beautiful in

its simplicity and gentle resolution.