For years, a mother duck led her new family of ducklings to the same pond. It was a place of safety and beauty. However, one year she found it dry and empty. Nothing remained but dried mud.
Yet she persisted in bringing her babies down to the pond, where she would walk about with flapping wings, anxiously quacking and trying to get her brood to enter.
The ducklings, however, with their fresh instincts, heard the far-off rippling of the water in a new dam being built farther upstream. The little ducklings refused to enter the dried mudhole. Instead, they left their mother quacking beside her empty pond and set out to find new water.
The mother duck had a closed mind. She could not accept the reality that the water was gone. She chose not to live in the real world so she remained in her little world because it was familiar.
Like the little ducklings, we must remain open to a new future, open to new ideas, open to others, open to learning new things--no matter what our age and experience. To do so is to maintain a childlike faith in God.