We are always torn between the
ever raging battle between what we want and what we have. We either want more
of what we already have or want something we don’t have. Some times its greed
driving this need and sometimes circumstance. And more often than not, we hide
our failures behind the need of what we don’t have.
A working mother would always
wish she had two more hands to complete the work a little bit faster so that
she could spend that much more time at home. While working on projects, I
always wished there were more than 24 hours to a day and timelines were a
little bit longer.
Consciously or unconsciously, I
had taken a path which had put me in pursuit of acquiring things I always
wanted to have. And soon I was living the life among the things I always wanted
to have. Wearing the brands I always wanted to, carrying the latest of gadgets
which I fancied.
Come my birthday, I had more
reasons to get more of those things I wanted. After having a great party thrown
by some of the best friends I have, I returned home to my quiet room. Quiet as my
dad was asleep in the other room. The movement inside the house after my arrival
had woken up my father. I was aching to get back so that I could open the presents
my best friends and I had presented myself with. While I was exploring one of
those, I heard my dad telling that he had gotten chocolates for me and they
were in the fridge. So engrossed was I in my precious gift that I forgot to
even acknowledge that I had heard what he told me. The sentence seemed familiar
but I was too occupied to even remember where and when I had last heard that.
Hearing no reply from me, he came
up to my room and wished me a very happy birthday and told me that he had
gotten chocolates for me. Sometimes, when memories which reside in our brain
wake up, they tear open our heart to come out. And through this gap came out
the memories of all the birthdays I had spent waiting for those chocolates
which had made the birthdays special. They weren’t special for the fact that
they were hard to find. But it was just because it used to mark a special day.
It was on my birthday 25 years ago that he had promised the ‘little’ me that he
would gift me a chocolate every year on this day. And while he had been keeping
his promise of gifting me this chocolate wherever on earth I am on my birthday,
I just realized that over the years, I had been making him come farther each
time to reach me. And farther; not always geographically.
Had I grown up not to see a
chocolate as a fitting gift anymore? Or was my father being childish in still offering
one even at this age? After all, it was a childish promise, promised to a
child. And I was no longer a child.
I accepted those anyway and he
returned back to his room with a smile. But a smile seldom of happiness. A
smile which was more like a self-acknowledgement of something. Something which
I couldn’t understand right away.
Chewing on some of the chocolates
he had given me, I spent hours pondering what that smile could have meant, and suddenly
realized that I may be missing the perspective altogether. May be I missed
understanding that what’s more important than having things we want is to want
the things we have. I could not see any other reason behind the tiring journey
he used to take every year just so that he could live up to the promise he made
when I was a child. And come to think of it, all the promises he has been
living up to.
Realizing this, I went up to his
room to thank him and also asked him why he had to travel this far to give me
the chocolates when I could have taken it from him when I visited my home next
time. To which his answer was that I will understand when I grow up.
It was that moment which made me
realize, that in the last 29 years I had just aged and not actually grown. Guess
all the pages of books I had mastered to reach the ‘growth’ (can also be
referred to financial stability, professional ability, IQ, etc.) I have today,
had not actually helped me grow at all.
May be growth is not about how
many of the complicated things we understand but how many of the little things
do we realize. It’s when we start understanding that responsibility is not
something we need to expect only from others. And responsibility is not when we
just commit to something but when we start keeping up all our commitments or
keep trying till our body hits the grave.
When he did come to my room to
give me my birthday present, maybe he was expecting that this year, I may have
grown old enough to learn these lessons. But whom he met was still a kid, but
just that the kid was standing taller than him. And God knows for how many
years he has been waiting to hear the question I asked him today. When I
decided to go to his room to inform about what I had just realized, I saw him
waiting for me at the door as though he knew I had finally grown old enough to
understand what and why he has been traveling all these years to meet me on my
birthday. I saw that smile again. But this time it was a self-acknowledgement
in happiness. But I still couldn’t understand what the self-acknowledgment was
about. I guess I will have to wait till my next birthday to learn it. And I
hope I would have grown old enough to understand that.
