Guest Post: A never-ending journey!

This is by a Toastmasters friend, Faizan. Not only did he bag the best speaker, he left behind many a teary eyes by the time he had ended. So, without much ado, here we go!

I was on my knees, with a ring in my hand and she was preparing breakfast. My 27^th Birthday. “I love you”, “I am sorry for troubling you all the time but I promise to keep this smile on your face till the day I am alive”. It was just happy tears trickling down her beautiful face. A tight hug. Oh! I wish I could just pause that moment forever. Just to make her happy made my day. My only mission was to make my only day of the year a day for her to remember forever. That is the best gift I could give her at that time. Even then it feels like I want to do much more for her.

We always need to realize and respect the fact people who love us make us special and do so much for us that we cannot keep a count. Selfless love. Love in itself is just an inert word but when said it trickles so many emotions, senses and feelings that we sometimes sink into oblivion of our happy memories and unknowingly wear that never fading smile on our face. Love never ends and we always long to be loved and to love someone who makes it a journey rather than a destination. 

I am sure every one of you would have held an infant in your arms. You go through a supernova of different feelings with that ‘awww…’ face reflecting the cuteness and beauty of this amazing creature you hold in your arms. You felt something. Now just imagine what would be the frequency and magnitude of the feelings and emotions when a mother holds her child in her arms for the first time. All the pain and the miseries that she went through just to give this child a birth, is all gone. Isn’t it something magical? Yes, my fellow toastmasters this magic is nothing but an unimaginable force of love. A force far powerful than any nuclear explosion or even bigger than the big bang.  A force that can change the course of a war, a force that can turn a boy into a man, a force that can turn a villain into a hero, a force that can bring someone lost… back, a force that can turn darkness in to light and a force that can bring a smile to someone’s face.

We as human beings have a tendency to long for something that we do not have. I am the only son in the family. I never had a real brother. My father’s best friend have two sons. Both elder to me. I always looked up to them since my childhood. They were like the ideal brothers to me. That is what I used to think. Both of them were voracious readers, so they always had something to share and talk about and I loved to sit and talk to them and listen to them. I learned most of the things about life growing up with them and learning from their experiences in life besides my own. Shaharyar bhaiya, the elder one joined Army and the younger one Haider Faraz pursued designing. I was still struggling for a job. They were my motivation and it was their belief in me that I can do something special with my life. Whatever be my achievements in life I would share with them and felt happy to know that they were proud of me. Three years back I messaged Shaharyar bhaiya on his birthday when he came back from Siachen and was posted in Ladhak at that time, saying that ‘ Major Shaharyar Haider, I have faced a lot of failures and success in my life but there is this one thing that kept me going. This one thing was your motivation that I would do something in my life. You always felt proud of me when I would achieve something in life, even if it was just winning a western singing competition or a cricket match. I thank you for how you have always treated me as your younger brother and made me understand what is right and what is wrong. I have always looked up to you’. Two days later I checked my message inbox where I saw his reply. He mentioned that he was overwhelmed and how it was the most special gift for him on his birthday. He said ‘Faizan you have always been as dear as Haider to me. I know we are not related by blood but we share a stronger bond which could never be weakened. I love you as my younger brother and will always be by your side’. I could just smile and feel overpowered by this feeling of brotherly love. This is one of most special things in my life that I would always cherish and has kept me going during the worst of my times. My unfulfilled love of a real brother was fulfilled.

We all have fallen in love in with something or someone at some point in our lives and we have all experienced it. We have experienced it through parents, siblings, friends and better halves. I am sure there are people in your lives for whom you won’t even think twice before taking a bullet and never let harm come to them. These are the people who make us realize and understand the value and importance of love. Your love for your goals and desires is what invokes you from inside and pushes you to do anything to go to the next level and hence make you worthy of what you desire. It is this force which makes you better. It is the love for peace and humanity that we condemn war and terrorism. It is the love of family that turns you responsible person. As they say ‘what you sow, is what you reap’, so sow love and reap love. It is the harvest that never depends on land, weather or location. It just depends on one thing, your heart. If your heart is in the right place everything will eventually fall back to its place.