Very Small Lives
How poetic of me to be posting exactly after one year.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about life and its purpose. Clearly, I'm hitting 30 soon. And before you know it, I shall be dropping the P-word (philosophy, silly!) in every sentence just to sound like I have reached some zen mode.
A lot of this thinking stems from my experiences at my workplace. Without getting into finer details, on a surface level, I can say that lately I am working with very special children—children with special healthcare needs. It's a small part of my work but gives me more motivation and the zeal to do better than anything else. It is a recent development in my professional life and the reason why I felt the need to write again.
We take privileges for granted—privileges that themselves have been granted to us by years of sacrifices by someone else. Some are just handed down to us by sheer luck, by default. For most of my life, I have considered myself deeply unsatisfied due to the 'small inconveniences' life has thrown at me. Looking back at those times, I feel a deep sense of shame. It's not that I was less wise back then, but it is difficult to imagine how, for years, I didn't consider the privileges I was born with to be enough to keep me grounded and subdued.
And then came these extraordinarily wonderful people. I would not use that very overused and beaten-down phrase, 'little angels who taught me a lesson.' I didn't learn a lesson from them, but they made me see from a lens that I had been ignoring all my life.
For some more context, these children belonged to an orphanage home for children with special needs who had been abandoned by their biological parents. Life wasn't cruel enough.
I had to go through their case files for some history-taking purposes, during which I came across the different situations where these children had been left by their parents. I can assure you that nothing other than extreme poverty could have forced them to take such a step. But we can all be at peace knowing these children are being taken great care of by their caregivers, and I can vouch for that.
What threw me into spirals of introspection is how unkind life is to them, but I don't see them complaining. Because there is no avenue to complain. While I sit on this heap of good fortune, considering myself to be a lost cause at every other second, these children would smile and cherish the simplest good gesture shown to them. It breaks my heart to think how grateful they are for those bare minimum efforts. I don't even want to compare myself anymore.
I notice my reflection in their eyes, standing straight with the protective gears in place, talking back. I look small, so small and insignificant. The world around me seems big enough to let me overcome whatever trouble a tiny speck of dust is causing me. The reflection mocks my existence. I can almost hear it telling me how very small my life —and its complaints—truly are.
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