If I ever needed a reminder, well, it was a lesson that was wasted on me today because there I was driving behind a vehicle in which the letters in the spare-tire cover read "Life is Good." No struggle to read what was right in front of my nose!
I took out my camera and clicked even as we were speeding along. I knew it would be a shaky, fuzzy shot. But, life is not always about perfection. Life is all about enjoying the imperfections, the blemishes, too. "Warts and all" as they say.
Life is good indeed.
I am nowhere the Ebola zone.
I am not anywhere near bombs bursting in air.
I am not freezing to death without a shelter.
I am not standing in street corners hoping to get some food.
That kind of a listing is endless.
Life is good.
Soon the "good luck" vehicle and I went our ways.
A pickup truck overtook me. The license plate grabbed my attention because it was personalized. I love some of those personalized plates in which the words seem like a cryptic Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle that then forces me think about what it might mean. An obsessive compulsive disorder, perhaps, to try to solve those personalized puzzles.
But, this one on the pickup truck was easy: PURLUCK.
Indeed, my good life is thanks to pure luck.
The very moment that I was born, thousands of babies were born in India alone, leave alone the rest of the world. But, how many of those hundreds of thousands of babies that share my birthday live as good a life as I do? Come to think of it, how many of my fellow-birthday-babies are already dead?
My good life is pure luck.
I reached home.
I realized that there was no leftover food that I could quickly reheat and eat. But, I didn't complain. Because, I know life is good.
I chopped up cauliflower, carrots, and a tiny piece of broccoli that was hanging loose with these vegetables. Sauteed with oil, chili flakes, and cilantro, and served over a bed of white Basmati rice.
Life is good.
Pure luck!
2 comments:
There is a deep philosophical insight behind your post. Indeed life is good, if only we pause to reflect on it. We really had a good throw of the dice, as you have so well outlined. This holds true for all of us reading this blog - however down in dumps we may be feeling at this moment.
And yet, it is, but natural, to feel angry, sad, and bemoan our luck, when the slightest thing doesn't go according to our wish. I suppose this is nature's defence against feeling too well and contended and simply stagnating to death. We have to be in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction to survive as a species, I suppose.
I am not so sure about dissatisfaction and survival as a species. We survived for thousands of years even in the literal darkness between sundowns and sunrises.
Even recently, whenever we went to grandma's village of Pattamadai, as a kid who had experienced nothing but 24x7 electricity of Neyveli, I was amazed that people in Pattamadai were perfectly fine with the scarce electricity. They were not at all unhappy that there was no piped water or toilets at home.
Was that happiness from ignorance? Maybe. But, in this contemporary world of "knowledge" I seem to run into a lot more unhappy people than the unhappy ones I came across in the "ignorant" Pattamadai ...
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