In the grand balance sheet of my life, the assets are expected to match the liabilities. But it always need not match, which can lead to mismatches. Something about these mismatches always made me a bit introspective. As my stay in Swami’s institution comes to an end, I am a bit confused whether my balance sheet is perfectly tallied or not. As seven years have passed since I have joined Swami’s educational institutions, am I happy to consign those years to the dustbin of history? Or did it give me so much that I look forward to carry its teachings into the future, for the rest of my life? Each part of my life has changed in some way or the other over the last 22 years of my earthly existence but perhaps no part is more significant than the last 7 years.
We all become what we become in life because someone believed in us much before we began to believe in ourselves. This is precisely the reason which I feel for getting admitted to the eleventh class in Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School. Life was pretty hard during school days, for I was lifted right out of the comfort zone and planted there. Problems frequented my ledger accounts, which in turn affected my balance sheet. Annual audits always revealed no profits but seemingly negative profits.
Checking through the ledgers I find, some periods had lots in store compared to others. It was second of May 2005 that I was disorganized by jaundice. There was nothing to worry about the fever but for the entrance exams of my B.Com within a week’s time. We couldn’t believe ourselves when the fever subsided within a short span of time and I was able to write the entrance exam. But it was only in my second year of graduation I realized how jaundice can really affect your health. It came back with such intensity that I was down on the bed for almost two to three weeks. I still remember how upset I was with Swami for giving me jaundice again. Only then I realized that I was supposed to undergo all these much before. If I had got this disease with the same intensity at the time of my entrance exams I would not have cleared it. I feel that Swami gave me those sufferings in installments, so that I could take it. God does not reduce your ‘Karmas’, what He does is this simple magic of converting the hard coins you have into soft paper money so that it is easy to carry arond, while the value remains unchanged.
Life wasn’t easy in Brindavan either. Ubiquitous presence of problems in any ledger account can cause mayhem while auditing. But I realized that God isn’t there to place you in comfortable situations all through the time. It’s unto you to solve the problem and discover the path. I stuck onto the prayers I learnt in my eleventh class. Whenever you have troubles don’t say, “God, I have big problems”, instead say, “Hey problem, I have a big God.” That’s why I feel that the long overcast sky is illumined by some glimmerings of hope in my life.
I feel that life is like a cup of coffee. You get up during a winter morning and to freshen up your senses you look forward to the cup of coffee. With curls of steam swirling up from the cup, with a book in your hand, you assume a distant gaze into the dewy grass through the window and slowly take a sip from the steaming cup of coffee. Suddenly you realize that someone had forgotten to put sugar into it. Lazy to walk up, you struggle through that sugarless cup, only to realize ruefully at the end of the coffee, lumps of sugar lying at the bottom of the cup. We are all the same, struggling through that sugarless cup most of the time. But the problems which we are so reluctant to welcome, can stir up our cup of life for the better. We fail to realize often that the sweetest part of all our lives i.e. Swami, lay just within our reach. We only need to reach out to Him.
Now when I close my balance sheet, I feel it’s almost balanced with no mismatches. As my journey comes to an end, all I can do is thank Him sincerely for all that He has done for me, and remind myself that we all become what we become in life because somebody believed in us much before we began to believe ourselves.
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