Friendship

It is late in the afternoon, and as I type away on my laptop, a gentle breeze causes my day curtains to billow.

From where I am seated, and through the open balcony doors, I see two mynahs seated on the ledge of the building next to ours.

Initially they are seated on opposite ends of the ledge, their faces turned away from each other. Have they just had a squabble?

Then, after a few minutes, one of them moves closer as if trying to talk to the other mynah. But, no, the second mynah will not have it. She turns away and starts walking away from her friend!  The friend moves closer, and the second mynah walks further away.

I so wish I could hear what they are saying. The first one is definitely trying to reason, but the second mynah is having none of it. She turns her beak up in the air and keeps taking small steps away from her pal.

But the first mynah is one persuasive bird. She does not give up, she keeps talking. Is she apologizing, is she explaining her point of view, is she telling the other mynah that she cares for her and that she will always be her friend despite their silly squabbles?

I sigh and wish that the other mynah would just say something. After a few minutes, the second mynah finally turns around. Yay!

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They talk, and seem to sort out their differences. They fly away soon, their petty disagreement totally forgotten and forgiven.

I smile. I am happy. Sometimes all it takes is to put one’s pride aside and talk to the other person to make things right! After all, true friendship is precious and totally worth all this effort.

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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!