Rest if you need to...

Someone close to me was diagnosed with a serious (not terminal) disease last year. The entire family was devastated by the news. The person was the man of the house, the bread-earner. As the days went by, the sudden shock started to subside, and what took over was hope. Hope that one day, the sun will shine bright again. Along with this came another line, a deep one - “Maybe this was God’s way of asking him to slow it down.”

We all are affected by the pandemic in one way or the other. There are days when we are down, picking on anything and everything around us. Then there are days when we choose to look at the brighter side. We see the clear blue skies, the lush greens, less pollution. The people in Delhi-NCR went berserk looking at the rainbow the other day. We enjoy the time with our families. We appreciate not being out in this heat. Some superficial ones like me are happy not getting tanned even. 

This got me into thinking as to why do we wait for something bad to happen to us to appreciate the good around us? Do we really need a pandemic to make us realise that we need to go easy? 

In this rat-race that we all are a part of, we often forget that deep down, we’re still the same people who would love a quiet evening eating home-cooked food. We’re still the same people who enjoy watching re-runs of our favourite shows time and again, and still, never get bored. We’re still the same people who get excited looking at the colours in an evening sky. Except, now we just take pictures to put up as Instagram stories.

When people say “Live each day like it’s your last”, they don’t ask you eat that last slice of a pizza, or buy that expensive handbag you’ve been eyeing for so long. They are simply asking you to slow down, to enjoy each moment, to actually ‘live’ it. They are asking you to pause and look how far you’ve come. Look how you finally have what you wished for. How you finally have that dream job, how you finally have your own house, how you finally have everything you genuinely wanted and needed. In short, all they’re asking you is to breathe and just be.

When life hits you, you don’t really think about the materialistic things that you own or want to own. All you want is normalcy. You want life to return back to its old monotonous self. So why not remind ourselves everyday that if we need to, we must rest. We might not be a part of the race that we’ve been running for so long. Maybe we need to pause, introspect, and finally take the next, maybe different, but a better step. 

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”