No Dress Rehearsals here….

Its often happened with me and I’m sure it would have happened with many of us as well.

There are times in life when we feel we should do something -offer help, exchange a few kind words, give financial assistance or express our thoughts/ feelings may be praise, gratitude or apologies to people close to us or may be even strangers. Sometimes we just listen to our hearts and go ahead to do it but very often we just miss out on doing it. Not that we get prevented by some binding constraint but that we just don’t have a willingness strong enough to go ahead and do it or may be we become too conscious to do it in front of others.

How often it has happened with me that traveling on my bike, I notice a small child or a man in a condition that touches my heart. I ponder over his condition for sometime and feel I should do something for him but by the time the feeling has grown strong in me, I have already driven a hundred meters away from him and so I simply let it go thinking that I’ll do something on the way back or may be in the next similar opportunity. But most often, I don’t drive back by the same route, or on the way back there’s too much traffic to change lanes or the man may not be there in the location I last saw him or my mind gets occupied by some other thoughts and I simply forget the whole episode. The chance to do my little bit to that man gets lost for ever and it gives me quite a sense of guilt to have not acted at that very moment when I felt I should.

I should have known that moments in life never repeat or reappear, so that moment or chance is lost forever.

Similarly, quite often we fail to express our feelings of joy, gratitude or apologies to colleagues, friends or even strangers. My own experiences are testimony to the fact that a few words spoken even to strangers at the right time can transform strangers into long lasting friends. I never knew that a couple of words that I spoke to a person on the first day of college could transform strangers to friends. Many a time, an act of kindness or a patient listening is all that was required to build relationships. I encountered so many similar occasions but did not act promptly on all of them. Why did I consciously lose out on so many opportunities is what I feel today.

Thinking back we may find atleast some occasions when we could have genuinely thanked our bosses for their support, there would have been plenty an opportunity to genuinely praise colleagues for their good work and several occasions when we could have expressed gratitude to our friends for several acts which we may not have taken notice of at the time they did. Most of the times, we would perhaps be lost in our own worlds and would have possibly turned a partially blind eye or a deaf ear to the world around. Not that we wouldn’t have praised our colleagues on such occasions but that they wouldn’t be full hearted attempts. Strangely but truly, the other person can always see how genuine or whole hearted our remarks are.

Sometimes, though we realize what’s to be done, we simply put off things for sometime and the delay ends up being an eternal one as the context for doing it gets lost with passing time. Everything that we do has a context associated and without the appropriate context things hardly have any significance. There’s no chance of revisiting the entire episode later. Had I been a little more alert, receptive and active at all these times, may be life would have been different- more and better friends, stronger relationships, good bosses that I need never complain of and more cooperative colleagues.

The strange thing about life is that on realizing that you’ve lost an opportunity, 95% of the times, however hard we try, its difficult to find a similar one again and do whatever you wanted to in the way you wanted to.

A recent novel that I read just 2 days back made me reflect over all of the above. It says - life is not a dress rehearsal. Making changes or adjustments in it later is near impossible. Whatever we go through is the final show and so what gets enacted is something that cannot be re-done -its frozen and final. And with these frozen acts, also get frozen our regrets, indifference towards others and with them several lost opportunities. A deed today is sometimes more worthy than an act tomorrow.

And all this only means that ‘now’ is the best time and so we should live every passing moment in the fullest possible way- rejoice to the fullest on our present achievements coz they’ll never come back again, help others whole heartedly and in the best possible manner coz there’s no second chance perhaps, give full credit and praise to people who deserve coz its will make us feel good to make others feel happy, tender apologies to whoever we think we’ve wronged coz we all know its not easy for people to forget bitter experiences and most importantly forgive others whenever possible coz a there’s a lot of joy involved both in forgiving and being forgiven. Once missed, we may never get a chance to do all of it again. Time is indeed unforgiving.

And this reminds me of Rudyard Kipling who said -

“ If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds worth of distance run.…. you’ll be a Man my son”