The slaps of reality

Photo credits: Google photos.

You never understand the worth of something/someone until they’re gone.

~Anonymous

My younger brother walked up to me a sunny afternoon last week. ‘ADEREMI, ADEREMI!!’, He called, ‘we’re playing this game, and the thing is that, you have to choose which super power you want to have’. I let out a thin smile and told him that I’d like to be able to travel through time. He screamed immediately, saying that I had been watching a lot of ‘FLASH’. I just laughed it off and pretended to be engrossed in the novel I was reading.

Truth is, we take a lot of things for granted, we do not appreciate the things we have, and the people we have around us. We always yearn for more, yearn for the pleasantries and excitement of the future, and we fail to realise what we have. We fail to appreciate the little things, and we are obsessed with Vanity.

“Just as we take for granted the need to acquire proficiency in the basic academic subjects, I am hopeful that a time will come when we can take it for granted that children will learn, as part of the curriculum, the indispensability of inner values: love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness.”

~ Dalai Lama

Now, back to why I picked time travel, lately, I have had a lot of free time to reflect, I have had a few experiences which has offered me a lot of closure on the transient nature of life, I have come to realise that these things I took for granted in the past, these things I thought won’t matter, these things, little and insignificant as they looked then, these things play a big role in my life now. I wish I can travel through time, because I’d like to correct some mistakes, and take some things more seriously. Though, I strongly believe in having no regrets, I am also of the opinion that if given another chance, you can do it better and avoid some unnecessary things.

Life is like a sheet of thin glass in the hands of a young child. Very fragile, you do not know what comes next, you do not know whether the child would smash it out of carelessness or keep it safe. We can not tell what the future holds, we do not even have the smudgiest idea of what tomorrow holds. A saying goes thus, ‘Man proposes, God disposes ‘. We can only try, out of our little wisdom as men, to plan for the future, but the thing is, nothing is certain. In a millisecond, a person’s whole life can be changed drastically. In one of the courses I took in high school, I can clearly remember my teacher telling me that people are born, just as people die, suddenly, quickly, within the twinkle of an eye.

A biblical phase says, ’empty handed you come, empty handed you go’.

The point of all these is that we should be more appreciative to the people and things around us, be more attentive and be more sensitive. Life is meant to be enjoyed with ones loved ones, and let us not let the quest to acquire vanities deprive us of this, because in true honesty, our memories are the only thing we have.