Once upon a time there was a spring who lived happily and safely inside a pen. Although he heard many noises coming from outside, he lived believing that outside his world inside the pen, there was nothing good. Even just to think about leaving his pen made him so scared that he was quite content to spend his life compacting and stretching himself again and again inside that tiny space.

However, one day, the ink ran out, and when the pen's owner was busy changing it, there was an accident. The spring was flung through the air and landed in the toilet drain, well out of sight. Terrified, and cursing his bad luck, the spring was flushed through pipe after pipe, each time thinking it might be his end. During the journey, he did not dare open his eyes out of pure fear. Nor did he every stop crying. Swept away by the water, he travelled on and on and on, until he ended up in a river. When the river current lost its force, and the spring could see that things had calmed down a bit, he stopped crying and listened all around him. Hearing birdsong and wind in the trees, he felt encouraged to finally open his eyes. What the spring saw was the pure, crystal waters of the river, the rich green rocks of the riverbed, and all kinds of fish of many colours, whose skin seemed to dance under the sunlight. Now he understood that the world was much greater than the space inside the pen, and that there had always been many things outside, waiting to be enjoyed.

After spending a while playing with the fish, he went over to the riverbank, and then moved on to a field of flowers. There he heard weeping. He followed the sound, which took him to a lovely flower that had been flattened by a rabbit, and could no longer stand up straight. The spring realised that he could help the flower, so he offered to be his support. The flower accepted, and slipped through the middle of the spring. There they lived happily together. And they would always laugh when remembering how the spring used to think that all there was to life was being a sad and fearful spring.