“He walked into the room empty handed but with a baggage of his thoughts. Last few days had been tough for him questioning the status quo and the decisions he had made for himself. Not all things matter but few matter more than rest of many clubbed together. He felt unmoved and nothing could fill his heart that would soften his stance. He could not be less hard on himself.”
He could be anyone: you, me or the person sitting next to you or the one after next. There are times we all go through when we do not understand what is good for us and what is bad. We lose the ability to differentiate the right from wrong. We get stuck on what happened with us and how we were put into those circumstances. We become quite objective in our thinking and thought process and come to conclusions faster than ever before. This, I say, is the recipe for disaster and throws us into a pit deep enough that it takes whole lot of effort to shake the dirt off and get your act together.
A while back I found myself in a similar situation. Nothing so different about it. It just took a toll and to get that load off, I went for a vacation. But the ghost of thoughts and reminiscences of the situations seldom leave you alone. They follow the trail and become your companion for no good. In the haze of sun rays, you start finding pollens and in the shower of rains, you hear thunder. If not anything else, you start reading and assuming things that were not written or have been said. You have a caucus of your own figments of imagination or the story that you kept telling yourself while you were not so yourself.
You ask many a questions to your own self: What went wrong? Where did I not do so right? Where did I falter? Where did my expectations exceed? Where did I not deliver? At the end of this rendezvous with your own self, all you have is a hint of those answers like an entirely closed room with a crevice at the ceiling that lets a little sunshine to pass through. All that is positive is that little ray of sunshine. But you need more than that. You need that to be coming from inside rather than outside – to dispel the darkness that resides within you.
And what gets you there?
I was visiting relatives. After a while and initial greetings I went to another room and sat alone catching upon a book (I always carry a book with myself primarily to avoid conversations I do not like/wish to be a part of). I had just turned a page when this kid (the child of the helper) came running to me and hugged me saying words in his broken hindi “Bhaiya, Bhaiya aap akele kyun baithe ho?” “aapko chai laa doon?” for he knows my love for tea and its capacity to turn my mood into better. He sat beside me as if accompanying me was his duty and his way of showing concern for me. He kept me engaged in the conversation about what happens when I am gone and how he is learning new words and becoming better at speaking Hindi. His candid conversation did make me laugh and I continued talking to him. All these days we both developed a camaraderie and the kid probably did some magic.
“A few days after when he went to his bed for sleep, he woke up from the slumber. He put the baggage of this thoughts down. He got up, looked outside the window staring at the tree that stood upright and contemplated how he stopped being himself for all this while when circumstances tossed. He let his heart go devoid of warmth and love that he had always believed wins everything. His reactions should not have been reflection of somebody else’s character but of his own. He shook himself. And that was the moments when he knew the turnaround solution to the situations. The love had made it possible again! He wondered that how that little kid had pushed the right buttons and poured warmth in his heart. His purpose of accompanying him all those days was bigger.”
The next day the sun shone brighter without any inhibition!
