A gift of growth

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.