Response

 There is this lovely anecdote that gets repeated ad infinitum on the social media. It reads as follows: Once a kid was playing near the sea shore. He hit the ball hard. The small little ball got lost in the deep waters.  The frustrated kid wrote in the sand "The sea is a thief."

Unfortunately, near that very shore, a young man drowned. His distraught mother wrote in the sand, "The sea is a murderer." In the evening, an old man who was suffering a lot, given his poverty, found  a shell with a priceless pearl in it. Extremely happy, he wrote in the sand, "The sea is a friend."

After some time started the high tide. A huge wave washed ashore, and while receding, wiped away all the three responses. What is the moral of this small little story?

To me, the moral is double-layered. For ourselves, I think, the message is, our own responses are like the writing on the sand. We think the message is permanent, forever etched. Well, there are very many such messages, and they are all temporary.

That leads us to the other side of the coin. Reactions by others, responses by others, however crude or vicious, need not hurt us as they are all temporary. They are determined by the immediate context, and can get wiped out any second. One should neither be very happy nor deeply depressed due to others' reactions, others' responses.

We should be like the wave. It is massive. It wipes out both the positive and the negative reactions, starts anew every second.  Similarly, we should learn from our past mistakes, the responses to them, and rebuild time and again, right?

Pratima@ Remember that eternally referred to song from the film 'Amar Prem'? Yes, you guessed right. "Kuch to log kahenge"!