The seller brought a transparent bag, filled one third of it with water from the aquarium, and then began chasing fish with his net to pick up the first guests to inhabit the new planet of fish that I had prepared. He put the fish in the bag and then filled the two-thirds of it with air, leaving a space to let the air pass so that the fish can breathe properly. After that, he brought a black bag and placed in it the bag of the fish, closing any light outlet.
I took the fish and got out of the shop. How difficult it was for me to receive my new guests in a small bag surrounded by black. Is that how the new life receives them? I could have told them not to worry…”I did not mean to hurt you by this darkness. Darkness is the secret of your being still alive now…you have a strong desire to breathe…but breathing, which is supposed to be the secret of life, will be the secret of your destruction if you go too far…while in the dark, the movement rate becomes less along with the rate of oxygen consumption.”
However, how can I explain this matter to them? How can I explain to them that this prevention is a sort of protection for them and that the apparent cruelty might be a mercy? There is no point… All that I could do was to go home and bring them to their new world where the water is purer, food is more abundant, and fuss is lesser.
I got home, but I did not put the fish directly into the aquarium. I took it out of the black bag and left it in the transparent bag, floating on the surface of the aquarium. The fish considered this crime more terrifying than the first one: they see the new clean environment, but could not move there…what could I do? That was the seller’s advice!!
The temperature of the water the fish were stocked in, is different from the temperature of the water in their new aquarium, and chemical properties such as salinity and acidity differ as well. Therefore, a gradual change of the fish environment should be adopted. So, the bag of fish is left to float on the surface of the water of the aquarium where they will be transferred to; by the time, the water of the bag acquires the same temperature as that of the aquarium. Then, a small quantity of the new aquarium water is put inside the bag…thus; the fish can be protected from shocks caused by the sudden change in the environmental properties.
However, the fish did not know that, they were so eager to live in freedom and in a clean world especially that nothing stands between them and this world except a thin transparent wall. They did not notice that the actual obstacle between them and the new world was not the wall of the transparent bag but their properties and the nature of their constitution that require a gradual transition. The fish did not distinguish between the desire and the ability, their desire to live in a new world and their willingness to have access to it.
There was a kind of confusion between the radical transitions as a destination and the path followed to reach these transitions, wanting it to be also radical and irrelevant to the old one. This is possible in cases and disastrous in other cases. In our case, the transfer of fish from an environment stacked with numbers, little food, and full of diseases to a better and healthy environment is a radical transition for the fish, but the path itself takes into account how to prepare the transition occurrence to proceed peacefully. The gradual path does not always mean that it is not headed to radical endings. Perhaps we think that, because as we got used to the gradual paths in the wrong destinations, graduation became a convicted path in any form.
A fish started screaming at the rest, “what is this humiliation?!” Why do you fear the sudden shift? Do you fear death? All the great transitions undergone by your ancestors were through the death of hundreds…it is a well-known path since ancient times and which passes through sacrifices.”
It was a sound argument. In the past, people used to transfer fish directly to the new aquarium without this graduation, and they were saying that this was an inevitable consequence in the fish life, thousands would die, and only those with high immunity would survive; the best transition occurred only through the mass death…considering this fact as a historical axiom.
As a result, history was destroying the future and the past was crushing imagination, and the inadequate science was dispelling any opportunity to learn or find out new paths, until it has been discovered how to make transitions with minimal losses, and that what was an inevitable consequence in the past has become a serious mistake. In addition, the death of hundreds of fish has been no longer considered by the professionals of this domain as a destined sacrifice, but rather a recklessness of a reprehensible ignorant. The philosophy has changed from the transition through thousands of fish to the future to the transition of thousands of fish to the future.
The angry fish was able to get out of the bag and jump out of it as soon as I had placed it on the surface of water to equalize the temperature; it was accusing its peers of cowardice. If only it noticed that the test of the bag was not a test of bravery but a science test. If only it faced their cowardice with an intelligent bravery; instead, it faced it with bravery that is mixed with stupidity. It jumped in the water… did not bear, and then was wriggling and flopping in the aquarium wall.
The rest of the fish gathered in front of the wall of the bag, following amazingly what was going on… that was the first victim on the planet of fish. Rather, life began on the planet with the smell of death… because a fish chose from history a scene of death…
Written By: Wael Adel
Translated By: Zoulikha K