THE PATH OF LIFE
By Asha Bachani
The word ‘Life’ itself is so expansive that when you close your eyes and take a deep breath, you imagine yourself losing the physical boundaries of your body and merging with the entire space of the universe around you. Yes ! that is what I feel. I feel peaceful and I feel so blessed. Our creator the divine power has been so kind to us, has given us everything in plentiful and made all the provisions on this earth, for us to live a wonderful life. And yet do we even realize this or are we even thankful for it? We take our wonderful gift for granted.
I myself did so for so many years till one day I came across an article in “Readers Digest”. It was a true-life story of a famous editor in New York. He was a young, healthy, successful man, when one fine day he had a severe paralytic attack whereby his whole body was paralyzed except for the movement of one eye. Lying on the hospital bed with an active mind and ‘almost dead’ body, he realised how he had taken his entire life for granted. Even small functions like swallowing food were now of major importance when he was being fed through tubes. But every cloud has a silver lining ! We, being part of the ‘Divine’ have great power within us. And with the blink of his eye he managed to write an entire book in the span of five years. He put up an alphabetical chart on the wall and with the help of a nurse who would point out the alphabets and with the blink of his eye, she would note down the words and frame sentences and thus the whole book was written. Isn’t it incredible!
This article set my mind thinking. Was I born only to eat, drink, produce children, have a social life, get old and die? Isn’t there much more to our ‘self’ and much more to our ‘life’. Our physical body is just a vehicle of our ‘true self’. The self has so much power that we can do wonders and yet we are all so satisfied with the least that we do. The best part is that we don’t even want to believe in our own powers. The true story of the editor, the true life stories of the physicist and scientist Stephen Hawking, the great cosmetic surgeon Sharad Dixit, who inspite of suffering from throat cancer and heart disease and surviving only on one glass of milk per day, performs ten free surgeries a day, are all living examples of the great strength of the spirit or ‘self’ that surpasses the disabilities of the physical bodies.
Yet, being blessed with a complete healthy body and everything going our way, all that we do is grumble and complaint. Is this what we were born for? Is this the path of life we choose?
With so much of misery, poverty and corruption around us, shouldn’t we all wake up? Shouldn’t we all realize that we are all children of a ‘Great GOD’ and with our positivity and goodness, strive to go beyond the frontiers of our families and work on ourselves and for the betterment of people around us to make the world a better place to live in.
One good deed a day
One good thought a day
One helping hand extended to a needy person
Can make the world more beautiful and then
A smile on every face would not be a rare sight.