churning of the ocean
In some discussion on the new Kannada movie Amrutha Dhaare, the meaning of Amrutha came up, and it led to the mythological story of the churning of the ocean.
Most of these mythological stories have very fascinating metaphors – the wiki link above describes the symbolism with this particular story quite nicely.
One thing is that while the intermediate components came up, for example initially poison… many quit then itself, they didn’t want anything more to do with amritha! Still some persisted. Then when Kamadhenu, etc came up, they ran behind it and forgot all about it. For them that was their end goal. Its only those who relentlessly kept going who finally made it!