Unexpected gifts

My Dad misplaced some medical records in our house and we spent pretty much the entire day looking for them. Almost searched every nook and crany of our newly renovated house. It has been a taxing day more so for me because I had been travelling for two days straight in one of my  most uncomfortable & harrowing train travels ever prior to landing up in this search mission. Now, I've caught an allergic cold from all the dust and still no success in locating the records. So, it has been a very unexpected gift only because I was proudly boasting last week about my immune system and how healthy I am while my family fell ill with allergic cold and from the heat. Life has a way of getting back at us. Is it Karma? Who knows? I certainly don't believe in it. May be, a tiny part of my brain dwells on it but never with full faith. Another unexpected gift has been the surprising retrieval of two design manuals I'd misplaced and thought lost. One of them is an Accessibility Design handbook and the other is a DCR book. Both important manuals, and albeit mandatory in my profession. The other magical gift has been unearthing some beloved memorabilia from my childhood- a few greeting cards and letters that warmed my kid self and made me believe in the power of words and love that only is best experienced through exemplary demonstration for children. 

And my most unexpected yet heart warming gift has been re-reading Che's The Motorcycle Diaries today. As I lay confined to the bed, I flicked through youtube and watched the movie. I first saw it in 2011, and have been in awe of the visually brilliant cinematography since then. After about six years, what I noticed today was that each of us are handed gifts in our lives, that we explore and understand very rarely since our senses have become accustomed to only seeing the very obvious. Sometimes I wonder if we are gradually losing our ability towards sensory experiences. How often can we truly sum up our happiness over visual beauty and the one that we feel with our hearts? How long has it been since a song touched us and made us reminisce sweet memories buried in our hectic busy lives? One of the nicest gifts that I have given and received has been writing and receiving postcards to strangers all over the world, only except that they never seemed like strangers, just friends I hadn't met. It is true that genuine conversation lits up morose atmospheres and perks up people and situations. I remember first reading The Motorcycle Diaries as a very dreamy eyed youngster just fresh out of college and  believing in the power of youth and our many manifestations about the world and changing it. Everything seems so transformed with our rebel spirits when we are young and ready to take on the world! Then we are gifting ourselves the precious gifts of youth and hostility, of strength and compassion, of eternal hope and faith in the world around us and our ability to change it. Our determination alone sets us apart from the quirky serious adult universe plagued with worry and misery. After having experienced Che's optimism and heartful hopes for the future in his diaries, I gifted it to one of my friends in the hope that he too shall find the necessary compassion within himself towards a better and kind world. This I believe was truly a memorable gift because I envisioned a moment in time when our aspirations matched and were unsurmounatble in the heat of all that was happening in the world. Now that I look back, so much has changed in the last six years and perhaps we have changed too as people who harbored same ambitions and spirits about humanity to being individuals with entirely different worlds today. And I am completely at peace even with this development. We put too much faith into people. I wouldn't change one bit about knowing that all of us evolve and stray from our passions and goals of our youth. It is also an unexpected gift, one which I've accepted and started treasuring. Amen to this newfound realisation!