The teacher called Life!

Everything happens for a reason. Nothing is by chance or your luck. Every action and reaction is well calculated somewhere in the cosmos and we are only purely executing it unwittingly. There is nothing that can be left to chance. I don’t believe in chance, fate, luck, and destiny or in any other word from this family because it doesn’t exist. It is either your hard work or someone else’s that makes or breaks things in your life.

Ever since I was a child, I would rationalize in my mind why certain things went wrong. And when they did, they mostly were followed by repercussions that taught me something. Every incident, good or bad, has something to teach us. When it’s good it’s easy to decipher. But when it’s a bad incident or offshoot, we often get busy crying and mulling over it rather than knowing what it actually wants to teach us. There is always a solution to every problem. There is always an alternate road to every broken path. Life is the best teacher according to me.

Every experience that we go through in life has such a deep yet subtle sublime lesson. Everything happens for a reason. It’s such a vast topic I don’t know which one point to pick to start. I remember, when I got bad marks or didn’t score as much, my parents would whine and my friends would mock at me, but deep down inside, I believed, this is not my path…studies is not what I want to do. So the dropping result graph kept re-assuring me that I was made for something else. One time, we were given an essay to write in school for our English subject. I don’t know how others wrote, but I wrote with my heart into it. I had never written with so much care and attention. A passage that was 3 pages long…. I was stunned when the whole class clapped for me. And this was just the next day after I got punished for not finishing my homework.

Small little things hint towards big results that we don’t know yet. The most interesting chapter of life is ‘people’. Every soul that comes into our lives has a purpose. We may choose to ignore it but cannot erase it. Even when a deluge of people is around you there may be one, who would have a purpose of being there… A book I read some time back by Mitch Albom ‘ Five people I met in heaven’, brought a smile to my face because the book says exactly what I mean here. We often ignore the people whom we come across in life. Either they are irrelevant or inconsequential. But our brain is not foresighted, so it only retains information that it finds is relevant for now. So the people we meet, the action we do are all an offshoot of the way our brain reacts. If you don’t exist for me now, you don’t exist at all! But that’s not true. Someone somewhere will cross our paths again. Haven’t we all come across situations in life where we met somebody for a short while and many years later met again in strange situations?! Don’t we all say ‘The world is a small place’! So isn’t it true that every soul has a purpose.

Everybody I have met has taught me something, good or bad. Whether it is making new friends, letting go of old, meeting complete strangers and reunion with the lost! This one person who taught me how to love yourself, one friend who showed me how beautiful life is. One amazing human I met on the strangest journey’s to Bangalore who taught me how to smile your problems away no matter how big and gory they may be. One friend who taught me to live life king size even when he was broke. He showed me little joys of life that did not need you to be rich with money, but rich at heart. My aunt taught me generosity, my cousin who showed me how to dress well and flaunt! So many friends who taught me what friendship is, even when I was a difficult person to put up with! These are the obvious ones!

But the real lessons you learn from people who are totally obscure. The beggars on the street, I have not seen a single frowning face ever. They may be God’s deprived children, but they don’t even know what they are blessed with. PEACE! No fuss in life coz they are so away from all the stress of it. This one boy I saw in Bandra who apparently lost his left hand in the train blast was working in a hotel serving food! Before that he was working in an MNC in their housekeeping earning well. That’s fighter spirit for you.

I owe a lot to life, for teaching me things that my text books forgot to teach me. I owe it to all the people who have touched my life by existing in it and being a part even if they were in the crowd. The five people I’d like to meet in heaven would be –

- My Mother, I have some questions to ask

- Charu, coz I will need her everywhere

- My friend Atul, for inspiring me, always

- My great grandfather, whose valiance I have only heard about.

- this one man, who I choose not to name, to settle a score up there!

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you learn to appreciate them when they're right. You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself...and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

Marylyn Monroe