A story about patience
Mello and the Race Everybody Won
Mello is always last and has started to wonder whether slow is just another word for bad. A story about going at your own speed.
3 minutes to read aloud Β· π Calm
Everybody had stopped clapping by the time Mello arrived. Not meanly. They had just run out of clapping.
"Well done, Mello!" said Winky, who had had time to eat a sandwich.
Mello sat down on the grass and, for the first time ever, minded.
Mello has never minded before. Mello is slow and steady and peaceful and has always been perfectly happy about it. But being last, again, in front of everybody, put a small cold question in Mello's middle: is slow just a nice word for not very good?
Tipsy came and sat down next to Mello, which took Tipsy quite a while, because Tipsy tip-toes.
"Did you see the beetle?" said Tipsy.
"What beetle?"
"On the way up. The blue one, on the third gate."
Mello had, in fact. "It had a sort of shine on it."
"Nobody else saw it," said Tipsy. "They all went past at forty miles an hour."
They looked down the hill.
"Zippy got here first," said Tipsy. "You got here having been here the whole way. Those are different journeys, and only one of you has seen a beetle."
Later that week Jitters was in a state about something, and everybody had advice, delivered quickly.
Mello just sat down beside Jitters and said nothing at all, for as long as it took. Breathe in slow. Breathe out even slower. Jitters stopped shaking after eleven minutes.
Nobody fast could have done that. You cannot hurry somebody into feeling safe.
Mello still comes last in everything, and no longer minds even slightly.
"Slow and steady, friend," says Mello, and then waits, without fussing, for as long as you need.
That waiting is the whole point of Mello. It is why the fastest fluffs in Candyfloss Land come and sit next to the slowest one whenever anything actually matters.
