As I heard my name echo with a
roar of clapping hands and applause, I saw bunch of smiling faces turn around
and look at me as I prepared to get up and reach the stage. Sophia Davis. The
star of the evening. Passing through people, I heard them congratulate me,
complimenting on how I have mastered to stun everyone by reaching the boundless
heights every now and then. I saw the
reflection of my perfection in the shinning glass floor of stage as I looked
down to hold my glimmering black dress. 17 years was the age too young to
define me but that was how I was. A young lady with all the imperfect
perfections.
As I stood behind the rostrum, I
could see the world sparkling with blur faces at the ground. I tried to
identify if they were my eyes who had dissolved so much in the happiness that I
was impotent to see the world around or my mind still had not believed me being
there. First one was a lie, I’m sure, but in either of the cases, I wanted the
truth to emerge on the canvas. It’s not just hard to achieve things; sometimes
it’s as hard to believe that you have achieved them. And for people like me,
it’s easy to accept that I’ve achieved it but hard to find the happiness
inside. I had no feelings as the person on the other side of stage started to
introduce me and praised my accomplishments.
She is a success story, not of
dreams or career but a triumph of life.
I heard the same laughter inside me after 20
years as I did when I seventeen. Wind of memories blew through my mind. Many
things in life had changed but success and my inability to find the answer
remained. My question? Happiness. I
had always interrogated happiness as I used to see people who, though possessed
many luxuries but, didn’t do well in terms of content. I did not realize that
in that exercise of searching for happiness, I had included myself in the list
of those people as well who were neither happy nor dejected. That seventeen years old girl was standing
behind the rostrum with the same question after all those twenty years. Have you seen a person wearing a helmet with a
light on it but not knowing that they can turn it on? Isn’t that ironic? I had
a helmet but learned to turn on the light after 38 years of my life. I had always
looked for the answer but never sought it until today.
I had seen my perfection in a
reflection on glass stage but never in a mirror, ignoring the fact that all I
had to do was to just look in the mirror. I had to catch the sight of the face
that people had been seeing in all those years and tell that you’ve never
thanked for what you had; still you ended up having more yet you didn’t sought
contentment from that “more”. More is always less if you don’t rejoice the
things you have and less is always more, it only requires appreciation. Happiness was there but I was just unable to
find the right door in darkness of ‘more’. It required just a few minutes to
stand in front of mirror and find the right key realizing that I had became
more beautiful without wanting more. The
whole world belonged to me as I discovered my first rule of happiness: Appraise what you’ve.
”If you want to be a triumph of life, be happy for who you
are, where you are and what you have with you.”
