Not very long ago, one of my former high school teacher sent me a message on Facebook, it was a pretty long one, but there was this concluding line that sort of stayed with me and still seems to linger on. She said “You my girl, am who I had always hoped to be”. This simple confession, I believe was the most beautiful and touching compliment that I have ever received in my entire life. Imagine, someone actually bothered, more so a teacher, that I held in high esteem, to acknowledge my petty existence, and elevate it to an altogether new height, it did leave me sort of dizzy, a couple of weeks if not months. Her acknowledgment, regressed me to a school girl, thrilled by the contents of her grade card.
Well, my elderly teacher, never ever publicly acknowledged my posts, or at least I don’t recall her doing so, neither did she ever comment or even so much so ‘like’ anything I uploaded. But, she claimed she patiently followed me ( no I would not term it as stalking), rather a silent observer seems more appropriate .For almost a decade she religiously tracked me on Fb and mentally documented the progress I made… from my ‘ baby steps to giant leaps’ is how she put it. You have come a long way from the girl I knew you in high school, and she went on to describe how and what she thought of me then and what she thinks of me now. This revelation in turn enabled me to view my own life from her lens, as if I was generously donated cornea and in turn a new vision to take a closer look at my life as it had unfolded, a life that I was blind to.
I hate to admit, but it’s much easier to play the role of being the helpless, hopeless vermin struggling and swaggering in the lower needs blissfully ignoring that there is much to life beyond the mundane. And just when you’re on the verge of retiring from a dynamic read stressful way of life and resigning to fate. Just when you’re certain, and you know deep down, you have reached a point in life where competition, conflict and confrontation, awards, recognition and rewards no longer can hold you in it’s sway. Here, comes this benevolent soul, who believes in you more than you believe in yourself and wants so much more from you.
I marvel at the psychic abilities of people like her, who go about lighting the candle of hope in frozen hearts. Silently whispering ‘The best is yet to be. Be Positive’. Like Sleeping Beauty being kissed after a hundred years of slumber. I wake up from a reverie, realising there’s expectations, and there’s commitments , moreover there’s evolution. And life calls. Life certainly is beyond my petite snub nose. And on an impulse I read her message once again and yet again.
At the end of it all, I can almost hear her read Robert Frost, in her loud high pitch voice…
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
