The past week had been quite hectic. Arrangements for the travel and office work took all the time I had and could not spare much time for reading and writing. It was supposed to be a vacation but ended up with long days stretching far into the nights. As a result, I had very little sleep and yesterday morning when I drove from the airport straight to office, I felt like a zombie. Those long nights were not by compulsion but by choice. There lies the difference between work and fun, I think. After long three years, our family was vacationing together. Though a lot of time was spent on socializing, meeting old friends after several decades and making new acquaintances, at the end of the day when we closed the door to our hotel room or our rented AirBnB, we five were alone together till the start of the activities next day. And that was bliss. Alas, I had to come back early due to my work commitments while the family stayed back for a few more days.
By this time, dear readers, you may be scratching your heads what all these had to do with the title of my post.In today’s competitive world where people are taught from their early childhood that winning is everything and being second best has no value, my title must be counter intuitive. During the past few days, amidst all the activities of attending a socio-cultural get together of people of my home state from the old country and trying to squeeze in some sightseeing, I still had time to write a few poems. It was only possible because my mind was at peace. The stress level was at bare minimum even with lack of sleep. As I was flying back to my home town, in the quiet of a plane full of sleeping fellow travellers taking the early morning flight and between fits of dozing off and awakening, I had a dream. I dreamt of King Midas and his golden touch. When he ultimately realized his dream of turning anything that he touched to gold, he also lost all his happiness. To be able to touch, hug, smell and eat like a normal person, without turning everything to gold, he ultimately begged for the curse to be taken away from him. Only when he lost his happiness did he realize that all that glitters is not gold. Hope all of us realize this sooner or later in our life without going through the agony of seeing our beloveds turning to gold or stone or hardened by our relentless pursuit of winning at all cost, pushing everything else to the backburner.
This brings me the word of my poem starting with the letter “W” for week twenty three of my fifty two weeks journey with “W” – winning. Need to win this battle of writing a poem starting with winning in next hour and fifteen minutes before Wednesday rolls over to Thursday. So bye for today till we meet next Wednesday.
This post is in response to Write Anything Wednesday-July-6-2016 sponsored by Writerish Ramblings
Fleeting Muse 