Back Again
I was cleaning up my old blog articles and finding the ones that had got lost in my Drafts folder and never got posted and found this one - and felt it deserved to be posted. Because what a coincidence! I was doing something this weekend that resonated with what I just started to write here...
I read an interesting article in The Young World (in fact go to touching the newspaper after a long time) yesterday - which set me thinking.
We live in times of excess - excess of everything - that we probably dont realize the sweetness of missing something or the value of anything at all!
I was cleaning up my kids cupboard and found about 7 boxes of crayons - each one of them opened and probably used just once or twice ; 15 pens of different shapes , sizes and types; 34 pencils ; 42 erasers of all different shapes, colors and fragrances ; 16 sharpeners (why would ever need more than 1 sharpener at a given point beats me!) - and all of these are not even bought by me !!! They all are part of the elaborate 'Return gifts' that I have collected over the years for birthday parties that the girls have been invited for!
Of course they dont realize the importance of a single thing! They dont feel the same attachment as I felt for the one and only one "pen-pencil' that I had all the years that I was a student at school and the sentiment that was associated with it as I had worked hard to 'earn' it as a prize for getting good marks in a particular exam!
Or the fact that I still keep the fountain pen that leaks ink every time you use it - but saw me through all of my college years - despite the leak - because it was the gift from my late grandfather!
The same goes for clothes. There is no longer the need to wait for an occasion to buy clothes now-a-days. The need for clothes is more driven by sale seasons or demands of various classes they attend to or worst of all birthday parties they attend to! I still remember how attached I was to the skirt I got for my 8th birthday - one that could stretch from one end of the room to the other - it was much more expensive than my parents' budget and so I valued it more than anything in my wardrobe - for I knew that the next time I got something really good would be about a year later - at the minimum!
Ah! I miss the good old days!
We live in times of excess - excess of everything - that we probably dont realize the sweetness of missing something or the value of anything at all!
I was cleaning up my kids cupboard and found about 7 boxes of crayons - each one of them opened and probably used just once or twice ; 15 pens of different shapes , sizes and types; 34 pencils ; 42 erasers of all different shapes, colors and fragrances ; 16 sharpeners (why would ever need more than 1 sharpener at a given point beats me!) - and all of these are not even bought by me !!! They all are part of the elaborate 'Return gifts' that I have collected over the years for birthday parties that the girls have been invited for!
Of course they dont realize the importance of a single thing! They dont feel the same attachment as I felt for the one and only one "pen-pencil' that I had all the years that I was a student at school and the sentiment that was associated with it as I had worked hard to 'earn' it as a prize for getting good marks in a particular exam!
Or the fact that I still keep the fountain pen that leaks ink every time you use it - but saw me through all of my college years - despite the leak - because it was the gift from my late grandfather!
The same goes for clothes. There is no longer the need to wait for an occasion to buy clothes now-a-days. The need for clothes is more driven by sale seasons or demands of various classes they attend to or worst of all birthday parties they attend to! I still remember how attached I was to the skirt I got for my 8th birthday - one that could stretch from one end of the room to the other - it was much more expensive than my parents' budget and so I valued it more than anything in my wardrobe - for I knew that the next time I got something really good would be about a year later - at the minimum!
Ah! I miss the good old days!
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