GOOD NIGHT, PAPA

 

“The Universe is not short on wake-up calls;

we are just quick to hit the snooze button.”

Brene Brown

 

Is there a ‘perfect’ time to make amends in life?

I think, no matter what, we make amends in life – call it course correction – only when the time to do so shows up. And, generally, when that time shows up, it does as a wake-up call…

That’s why, wake-up calls in life are necessary to shake us up hard and wake us up to make changes.

Brene Brown reminds us:

“The Universe is not short on wake-up calls;

we are just quick to hit the snooze button.”

Two days ago, a dear friend of mine was telling me how one of the wake-up calls shook him hard, one late night… This friend’s company had asked him to move to Canada to handle extensive volume of work covering various parts of the world. The job responsibility and the family responsibility, often, find themselves at loggerheads. Two school-going kids, wife and elderly parents in India – the house, car and education loans… It’s a constant challenge not to let work-family balance derail. Eat together, pray together, spend quality time with your growing kids – yes, these are the beautiful ideals and, like most of us, my friend, too, wanted to cherish them. But, the deep sense of job insecurity in a new country seemed to sidetrack the very little things for which my friend was working frantically…

“I had to work according to multiple clocks – South American, North American, European… and, here in Canada, I did not realize it was time for my family to eat or go to bed,” my friend was telling me, “One early morning, while I was logging out of my laptop, I saw a note… My teenaged daughter had slipped it quietly: ‘Good Night, Papa’… That was the wake-up call I needed to take a pause and decide to put first things first.”

Well, there are a hundred such wake-up calls, as Brene Brown says, the Universe keep sending to each one of us, every now and then. You see, no one’s life, here on earth, is perfectly balanced… Perfect balance is a distant dream, let’s accept this practical reality. However, some little things – those things for which, after all, we slog frantically – are to be balanced with our work.

To my friend, the realization, that his little girl had to slip a note to say ‘Good Night, Papa’ was the last straw… He decided not to hit the snooze button of that wake-up call…

George Eliot said: “It’s never too late to be who you were meant to be.”

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic’s: Pixabay

Video: When Chai Met Toast