Setting off a positive ripple

The universe is poised on a rational exchange, what you give is what you will get. This truism becomes progressively apparent as we navigate through life and discern incidents in our lives.

After the birth of my nieces, my sister decided to be a homemaker. She felt that her daughters needed undivided attention. At different intervals, we suggested that she consider pursuing her passions and persuaded her to take up a job.

However, she was keen to devote her time to the girls and her family. She kept an extremely neat house, her pantry was loaded with goodies, and her daughters were the neatest and best-dressed kids I had ever seen.

Time, like a dry leaf, gently turns with the wind. As old times end, new ones begin. When her daughters were considerably older she decided to take charge of her life again.

As she enrolled herself in a teacher training program, she understood that her well-organised home would witness a paradigm shift.

She spent time preparing her family for the change that would come. However, she wasn’t quite prepared to experience the commitment that she had bestowed on her family to be reciprocated, and become her salve during particularly trying days.

The night before she was to begin her training, her children packed her bag. In the morning, her daughters filled her water bottle, checked that she had markers, pens and stationary.

In the evening when she returned from work they offered to make her tea. The younger one even promised to do her homework on her own so that her mother could get some time to relax.

This could be a general occurrence in some homes, but for her, this meant more than any routine.

A positive thought or action generates a ripple of benevolence, the impact of which reaches far and wide and exalts the person who started the ripple at the start.

Time might fly swiftly without our notice, but it does not forget to leave its shadow behind. My sister’s home is the epitome of this pulsating, content shadow of time.