HOW PUDDLES BECOME RIVERS
I had to go out on an urgent call from the office, and after dealing with the crisis, I decided to walk home. However, half-way back home I was caught in a sudden downpour and sheltering in a nearby alcove, called my husband to come and pick me up. While I was waiting for him, I was idly looking at the puddles being formed on the road, and noticed idly how they were becoming larger by the minute. In front of my very eyes, one little stream ran into another, till it became a little rivulet.
I guess that is how life is. One thing runs into another, till suddenly, what you are facing is not just a routine affair, but a crisis that you perhaps just don’t know how to handle. Small issues have this niggling characteristic of troubling you but you are able to shove it aside and get on with your daily life. But somewhere it still exists; and when you least expect it, you find it looming up in front of you as large as a river, threatening to break the dam. You did not realize it would grow and multiply; what contributed to its growth? There they are, like little mushrooms, one growing over the other, like little toadstools in a rainy season under the forest tree. What fed it ? Our attitude to issues that we did not bother to handle, thinking they are small ? Our lack of attention to matters that should have been sorted out then and there, so that the issue no longer remains an issue, but dissipates into thin air and ceases to exist ? Or, is it because the dam has not been fortified, so that even if the large storm breaks over it, it could have withstood the assault?
If only we are able to handle issues at source, I am sure the world would have less of crisis management teams. We would need less life-saving drugs, less counsellors, less divorce courts, and less heart-aches. For what are minor irritants do not cause these; major ones do. And major ones are minor before they catapult into catastrophes.
I had to go out on an urgent call from the office, and after dealing with the crisis, I decided to walk home. However, half-way back home I was caught in a sudden downpour and sheltering in a nearby alcove, called my husband to come and pick me up. While I was waiting for him, I was idly looking at the puddles being formed on the road, and noticed idly how they were becoming larger by the minute. In front of my very eyes, one little stream ran into another, till it became a little rivulet.
I guess that is how life is. One thing runs into another, till suddenly, what you are facing is not just a routine affair, but a crisis that you perhaps just don’t know how to handle. Small issues have this niggling characteristic of troubling you but you are able to shove it aside and get on with your daily life. But somewhere it still exists; and when you least expect it, you find it looming up in front of you as large as a river, threatening to break the dam. You did not realize it would grow and multiply; what contributed to its growth? There they are, like little mushrooms, one growing over the other, like little toadstools in a rainy season under the forest tree. What fed it ? Our attitude to issues that we did not bother to handle, thinking they are small ? Our lack of attention to matters that should have been sorted out then and there, so that the issue no longer remains an issue, but dissipates into thin air and ceases to exist ? Or, is it because the dam has not been fortified, so that even if the large storm breaks over it, it could have withstood the assault?
If only we are able to handle issues at source, I am sure the world would have less of crisis management teams. We would need less life-saving drugs, less counsellors, less divorce courts, and less heart-aches. For what are minor irritants do not cause these; major ones do. And major ones are minor before they catapult into catastrophes.
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