Fullness in the present

There can be several instances in our daily living, when unexpected things happen and we are taken by surprise or disappointment.

The train I was travelling to go to Chennai yesterday had to wait at a station for over five hours to get clearance, due to a landslide that blocked the rail tracks. I was terribly disappointed at the likelihood of missing the morning part of an important meeting for which I had planned this journey a few months in advance.  I stayed brooding over it.

That is when I heard a three years old child telling his parents: ‘I am glad that we can have a longer time in the train’. She kept listening to music, colouring her picture book and trying to read her picture story book.

Her parents, although did not agree with her view, suddenly looked disarmed of their anxiety seeing how easily their daughter was coping. The family told us that they did not carry food or medicines for asthma for their daughter as the journey would have been normally only for eight hours.

There were professionals who were discussing well past into the midnight how they would have to disappoint their ‘clients’ when they came to the office in the morning. One of them was so disturbed that she spent all the five hours we waited at the station, talking to several people on her mobile phone, in spite of her friends trying to pacify her. She woke up people, hundreds of kilometres away from their sleep, to speak to them about her woes and inconveniences. She continued this pace of contacting even more people after the train resumed its journey to tell them how she had to wait till midnight to have her super. One of her friends had to forcibly take away her mobile away to let her and others sleep.

All of us react differently to unexpected events or disappointments. What determines this! 

Let me suggest that it may be our outlook to life. Life is always unfolding before us its purposes and formative experiences, through the circumstances we are called to go through.

This is explicit from the attitude of the three years old child, who viewed the delay of the train with greater ease than all the adults who were affected similarly.  The adults carried with them experiences, insight and a wealth of resources to draw from. What the adults conveyed was anxiety and preoccupation with disappointment in spite of this.

A child conveyed confidence, comfort and engagement in what was possible at that given time and overcame the circumstances of inconveniences. A child of younger age can turn the present moment to a greater use than what adults normally do, when faced with a disappointment because they are less driven by expectations or ambitions.    

There is nothing as certain as the present given moment.  We live fully only when we can learn to be fully present to the present and turn it into an opportunity. When every body was complaining this morning  about delayed breakfast due to the late arrival of train, one college student suggested,  it gives me an opportunity to feel hunger’. Every experience invests knowledge, insight and fortitude in to our life.

M.C.Mathew (text and photo)

P.S. The bird in this blog was spotted, whose name I am yet to find, when I walked out in disgust over