We can all learn a little bit from this video.
A snowy, steep mountain landscape is being traversed by a mother bear and its cub, but the baby bear clearly doesn’t have as much mountain climbing experience as its elder.
As the pair of bears walks along the slippery slope, the mother bear is able to carefully work its way to the peak, but the baby bear continues to loose its grip and slide down the snow.
I don’t know for certain, but it very much looks like this is a learning lesson for the small cub. The bigger bear tentatively arrives at the top, and though it goes back down a little bit from time to time, it seems as though it is up to the baby bear on its own to conquer the icy mountain.
The baby bear slips and loses ground over three times in the video, but it never gives up. Not even when it slips on the ice and falls probably close to 80 feet down the mountainside.
After every setback, the cub brushes the dirt off its shoulders (in the figurative sense of course) and keeps pushing forward. I wish I had half the fortitude that this baby bear has.
You can’t help but wish you could jump through the screen and help the poor, struggling little bear get up to the top where the mother bear is waiting. However, if you did touch the cub to help it to the peak, the big bear would probably thank you for the assistance with a nice mauling.
Everyone knows not to mess with a baby bear, and apparently even their “guardian bears” know that the cub has to figure out things on its own.
Is it weird that the video kind of reminded me of the board game Chutes and Ladders? Especially that climb right in the middle of the video where the cub slides almost all the way back down to the bottom of the slope.
I used to be livid when I would get close to winning the game and then land on the chute that took you all the way back to the start. I have to think that bear felt the exact same way.
Next time you feel like giving up though, just think of this baby bear and say “if that little cub can do it, so can I.”
