Digital surprise

My son has just come back from school. He usually washes up and spends 10 to 15 minutes playing games on the iPad, after which he eats his evening snack.

However, today, as I watch him, he skips the washing-up part and goes for the iPad directly, to quickly check the status of one of his games.

I ask him to go wash up. My words seem to fall on deaf ears. I repeat in various modulations –

1. The polite voice

2. The polite but slightly louder voice

3. The polite, firm and loud voice

4. The threatening voice

He pleads, I relent. I go away to attend to some chores. Ten minutes later he is in the same position, totally oblivious to anything but his game.

I walk over, and take away the iPad. He gives in without a word, as he knows the rules. He mumbles a sorry.

 As I take it away, my hand accidentally presses the iPad button a couple of times.

And suddenly, creeping into this little scene is Siri’s voice, which says, “I’m sorry. I can’t help you with this.”

Courtesy – news.softpedia.com

We both look startled, and then burst into peals of laughter.

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The choice is ours

I recently watched a video on personal transformation, where the speaker spoke about about how one should try to work towards becoming ‘extraordinary’.

This really got me thinking. All of us are running different races. Each race is unique. All of us are travelling on different paths, meeting people along the way – some people who stay with us for a long time, and some others whom we know for brief periods of time.

If we were to zoom out and look at our lives, we would see billions of such paths, criss-crossing each other. It would be very difficult to distinguish one line from the other. All of them would look quite ordinary.

So then, we have a choice – to either lead an ‘extraordinary’ life, in the truest sense of the word, by giving ourselves fully to every moment on this journey called life or to lead an ‘extra’ ordinary life, where we carry a lot of extras like our ego, regrets, anger, greed, jealousy and ill-will. In this case our life would be burdened by all these extras and will truly remain ordinary.

However, if we drop these extra burdens that we carry with us, we can truly lead an extraordinary life.

Extraordinary or ‘extra’ ordinary – the choice is ours!