Making ones peace

Sometimes I wonder if God furtively looks down upon the human race and sheepishly marvels at man’s helplessness in certain occasions. I have been compelled to speak my mind as the noises within are too loud and I can’t pin point where they emanate from. Last week I met somebody for the first time, a distant family member and it filled me with immense gratification when he mentioned that he was ninety years old. That is the beauty of existence; you see someone as was with this person, old, healthy, wrinkled but with the funny bone intact and you tell the person ‘good show man’. The very next day on a very hectic work day I get a SMS, stating that a work colleague whose father had passed away a week ago had lost his three year old son to some medicines backfiring. This person had only rushed to Isloo last week for the burial and another calamity had befallen him. I know this person well enough to know that he is a very amiable person and very well liked. The information overload within a space of 24 hrs was too much for me to digest. Here I was, only yesterday night, celebrating the resilience of the human spirit with this old guy still living it up and the next day my soaring spirit gets its wing tips burnt and reality sets in. My first reaction was to call up this colleague and offer consolation. But then the reality hit me that man made words are weak building blocks to build a dam against the emotional tidal wave inside one. The realisations hit me harder that I can only reflect and that I can not feel his pain or share it with him. I messaged him expressing my deep condolences but my words seemed amorphous and cold. The fact that soon thereafter I went back to the vagaries of work life and that I had chicken biryani for lunch made me feel this extreme guilt of sorts then as time rolled over me. Maybe emotions too have a shelf life.