LOOKING BACK WITH DIFFERENT EYES
You walk around the garden on a dewy morning and pluck the best flowers for offerings. They are arranged in a wicker basket according to the colours and sizes. You take so much pride in taking it to school amidst all the hustle and bustle. You offer the flowers and recite the 'gathas' aloud, with the ribbons in your plaits dancing in the soft February breeze. The activity brings you bliss, you are still too young to give a name. Yet, the smile on your lips vanishes the moment you step again into the shrine room after school to collect your wicker basket. The flowers that were in full bloom in the morning have withered; their petals are stuck to the container. Meditating on it for a moment, you try to come to terms with the fact that every living thing comes to an end. As a child, you might not grasp the gravity of it then, but the sight of the flower basket will help when you try to bear the grief of losing someone close to you.
Perhaps, there are things you learn as a kid that come to your comfort when you are an adult. Sometimes we do not realize that most of the things we have learnt in life we have learnt without knowing their significance.
When you were small, every crayon that broke into two when you were drawing, taught you that a lot of beautiful things in life are delicate and need to be handled with care. Also, it gave the idea that nobody really expects a child to have a perfect box of crayons given the nature of the person who owns it. When you were growing up, you must have realized that, even the broken crayons would colour as perfectly as the unbroken ones. Thus you learn there are more important thing that matters more than shapes and looks.
You must have been too small to realize that the real lesson behind keeping a caterpillar locked up in a jam-jar, was not all about learning the life-circle of a butterfly. It is about realizing the importance of enduring hardship and emerging jubilant. Like the caterpillars that do not become butterflies overnight, great things are not created instantly.
At one point of your childhood, you fell in love with sand castles and it topped the list of your favourite hobbies. You spent so much time squeezing the soft brown sand in your palms despite the scary tales about worms getting into your body. Yet, however strong and majestic they looked, when the afternoon came and the water absorbed into the sand evaporated in the mid-day heat, the castles toppled without prior warning. Thus you realize that, like the castles, dreams too can be razed to the ground. Yet, you know better than the infant who cried over a shattered kingdom. Thus, you put your head down, arm yourself again and start from the very beginning on a new territory.