Expectations was the first word that struck me when I'd clicked this one. Just the spade of leaf pitted against the enormous skies in its only aspiration to be there. It exemplifies a sort of ambivalence of somewhere that it wants to reach and of something that it is bound by [the hand holding it], and the crossroads at where the leaf is right now....
Probably expectations have a similiar fate, that of to be at the crossroads and yet not surrender hope!!