Relationships

As I enter my balcony today I find it in an appalling condition. My mother and I had planted all these lovely plants with a lot of love and affection. I feel the tiny little beings screaming at me for not tending them for a last few weeks. My ignorance towards my plants had led to a complete chaos in my balcony, some creepers had extended their boundaries and flailed at any random places, one of my favourite rose shrub had attracted insects on it and my Tulsi plant ensured that it had its springs in all her neighbouring pots.

 After looking at them closely and talking to them a little sorry, I immediately started on my mission “Re – Beautifying Garden.” As I removed the weeds from a few of them, replanted those who had outgrown their sizes of pots, fertilized each of them, trimmed those extra stems from almost all the plants and plucked those lifeless Chinese roses and a few withered leaves from all over the balcony, I realised how the principles remain the same for our relationships too. To end my mission successfully I watered each of them and gave the colourful crystals their nice soft, insect free bed of mud back.

  As I sip my hot steaming cup of tea, enjoy the weekend, I still linger on the beautiful smell of my balcony and the thought of relationships. How elegantly has that little corner of my home revealed the significance and the secret of relationships to me today. In all my busy life how easily I had kept aside one of the most significant part of it – My Relations. I realise how important it is to revisit each of the relations that I belong to, to remove the weeds of misunderstanding and assumptions. It is essential for me to trim those moments of mistakes that each did while playing their role in the relation. I need to be vigilant and remove the insects of expectations and doubts from the relation. The ego issues and that need of sorry from the other person had allowed the distance to flay beyond boundaries.

 I need to fertilise each of my relation with trust and then to completely nurture it, I had to water with the adequate quantity of love. If my plants are watered more they develop algae and a few of their leaves turn yellow. Similarly with relations, if I pour my excessive love on them, I initiate a need of wanting to control it, to possess it and leave the other person to feel throttled. If I do not water my plants sufficient, they start showing the roots at the surface and so does the relations  those are not nurtured with enough love start showing their feeling of devoid in open and leaving it open for the world to draw scars upon.

 One plant from my garden that day I had to part ways with because no matter how much I would fertilise and water it, the roots were dead and this plant had lost its strength to live again. It was difficult for me to bin that tiny little plant. Next day when the maid came and saw that dead plant over the dustbin her response taught me one final lesson from my garden. “Tai, don’t throw this, the dried leaves can be used as the fertilizer to other plants, the stems can be used by us as fuel to cook our meals for a day.”  Relationships similarly need to end if they only provide you with the hurt and when there is no respect left between each other, but the lessons and the memories that the relation has provided us with shall stay with us forever.

 As my Guru Mahatria mentions, “In life, as well as in a good relationship, the past is irrelevant. The present forms the building blocks. Take time to listen and understand. As often as possible, communicate to be understood.”

 Relationships are the lifeline to live this life gracefully. Expressing the right emotions using the right words is inevitable. I vow this to myself today, “By attending and caring for my relations regularly I shall provide my life a fresh and an insect free bed like I gifted the crystals their mud bed back”.