hmm came accross this column by NST journalist Kalimullah Hassan. Iv been enjoying his writing so far. But this column written on yesterday 5thJune05 was somewhat mesmerising, thought provoking, but also brings along a cloak of sadness.
K.Hassan wrote:
We hardly ever know what to say to the close ones of those who depart so suddenly. I scoured books and surfed the Internet trying to find out what people say on such occasions.
But there never seems to be the right thing to say because only time heals grief. I came across a letter on the Internet written by a young child who had lost someone she loved. She wrote:
Dear God,
Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t You just keep the ones You have now?
We always find difficulty in accepting the inevitability of life. We have all gone through such personal tragedies in our own lives.
And unsurprisingly, someone always raises the question: "Why did I not do more? I could have made life happier (for the departed one)."
We all live with such regrets.
In an anonymous Internet posting titled If Tomorrow Never Comes, a tormented writer wrote:
If I knew it would be the last time that I’d see you fall asleep, I would tuck you in more tightly and pray to God, your soul to keep.
If I knew it would be the last time that I see you walk out the door, I would give you a hug and kiss and call you back for one more.
If I knew it would be the last time I’d hear your voice lifted up in praise, I would videotape each action and word, so I could play them back day after day.
If I knew it would be the last time, I could spare an extra minute or two to stop and say "I love you", instead of assuming you would know I do.
If I knew it would be the last time I would be there to share your day, I would not think, "Well I’m sure you’ll have so many more, so I can let just this one slip away."
For surely there’s always tomorrow to make up for an oversight, and we always get a second chance to make everything right.
There will always be another day to say our "I love you’s", And certainly there’s another chance to say our "Anything I can do’s?"
But just in case I might be wrong, and today is all I get, I’d like to say how much I love you and I hope we never forget that tomorrow is not promised to anyone, young or old alike, and today may be the last chance we get to hold our loved one tight.
Why wait for tomorrow when you can do it today?
For if tomorrow never comes, you’ll surely regret the day that you didn’t take that extra time for a smile, a hug, or a kiss and you were too busy to grant someone, what turned out to be their one last wish.
So hold your loved ones close today, whisper in their ear, Tell them how much you love them and that you’ll always hold them dear, Take time to say "I’m sorry", "Please forgive me", "Thank you" or "It’s okay". And if tomorrow never comes, you’ll have no regrets about today.
As we grow older, and as we learn to accept that we will not live forever, we try to make the best of what we have.
But we keep learning new things and keep meeting extraordinary human beings who teach us that there are so many different perspectives to life.
A close friend of mine, a very generous and charitable human being, always says "it is more blessed to give".
He lives by what he preaches, trying to help people whenever he can.
But I never realised the depth of what he meant until he emailed me a story which I have always cherished. It is about a young man writing about a car given to his friend by his brother.
It is probably fictional but it tells us that we can always help make people happy and make ourselves happy. The story goes thus:
A friend of mine named Paul received a car from his brother as a present. One evening, when Paul came out of his office, a street urchin was walking around the shiny new car, admiring it.
"Is this your car, Mister?" he asked.
Paul nodded. "My brother gave it to me as a present."
The boy was astounded. "You mean your brother gave it to you and it didn’t cost you nothing? Boy, I wish..." He hesitated.
Of course, Paul thought he knew what he was going to wish for. He was going to wish he had a brother like that.
But what the lad said jarred Paul all the way down to his heels. "I wish," the boy went on, "that I could be a brother like that."
Paul looked at the boy in astonishment. Then impulsively he added, "Would you like a ride in my car?"
"Oh yes, I’d love that."
After a short ride, the boy turned and with his eyes aglow, said, "Mister, would you mind driving in front of my house?"
Paul smiled a little. He thought he knew what the lad wanted. He wanted to show his neighbours that he could ride home in a big car. But Paul was wrong again.
"Will you stop where those two steps are?" the boy asked. He ran up the steps. Then in a little while he came back, but he was not coming fast.
He was carrying his little crippled brother. He sat him down on the bottom step, then sort of squeezed up against him and pointed to the car.
"There she is, Buddy, just like I told you upstairs. His brother gave it to him and it didn’t cost him a cent.
"And some day I’m going to give you one just like it, then you can see for yourself all the pretty things in the shop windows that I’ve been telling you about."
Paul got out and lifted the lad to the front seat of his car. The shiny-eyed older brother climbed in beside him and the three of them began a memorable ride.
That evening, Paul learned what it meant when people say "It is more blessed to give..."
The lesson in all these is that we should not wait for tomorrow to do what we can today. There is never a "more right" time than the present to do the simple things that we can to make our lives and that of others happier.
Giving is a virtue that we could all easily adapt to.
It is not easy to be magnanimous all the time. Somehow, it has become the natural tendency for people, especially in the city, to be spiteful, selfish, self-centred, hurtful and malicious.
Altruism, philanthropy and humanity are getting to be rarer commodities in our world.
Back to me *michelle* again.
to anyone who reads this, if anyone is to worry about the amount of money needed to spent on getting a loved one a gift, taking em out to posh eat-outs, buying that Tiffany she always wanted, or getting the whole world for the person just to make them happy.. i bet there aint nothing wrong with that. But even a beggar could afford a smile, a hug, a kiss, to care, and to love.
"The greatest of ALL, is LOVE."
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