Every grain of sand counts

Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy is worth remembering: "When someone points one finger at you the other four fingers are pointing at himself…"

Years ago, while teaching in middle school, one of my grade five students came up to me with a long face, saying, "Ma’am, we lost a match, and the other sections are teasing us, calling us losers." Children are remarkable at calling a spade a spade, but they can also be cruel in their name-calling.

I felt saddened for awhile but recovered my wits to comfort my dejected student, giving him a snippet of wisdom from a movie I had watched. In this movie, when a boy questions his friend’s somewhat quirky experiments with plants, the budding scientist holds aloft a seed and tells him, ’’What you see before you is just a pumpkin seed. What I see is a world of opportunity.’

Then, I followed up this example with these immortal lines by Julia Carney from her poem, Little Things: "Little drops of water, /Little grains of sand, /Make the mighty ocean/And the pleasant land. /So the little minutes, /Humble though they be, /Make the mighty ages/Of eternity."

I continued my words of reassurance: ‘’In the big picture, even if it seems like you are a nobody, you make all the difference... like a little grain of sand, you have your own role to play in life."

Then, I decided it was time for some morale-boosting talk, with which I normally began every class in every school that I had been: ’’Every person here is unique and beautiful and gifted in his or her own way, so feel proud of who you are and aim to always be the best." Further, I added a few pearls of wisdom I had gleaned while reading some books: "Remember that in life there are many ways of looking at yourself. What you think you are, what others think of you, and who you actually are...’’

I rounded up the pep talk by saying, Focus on your inner strengths and have faith in God; you will never go wrong in life. And eventually, you will find that the world is your oyster. I then quoted from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘’If’’, ‘’If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you... / Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it..."

Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy is worth remembering here: "When someone points one finger at you the other four fingers are pointing at himself…"

So why feel bad about what others say? The class seemed much comforted. Mission accomplished!