In a book, a spiritual guide is in habit of meeting different kinds of people and freeing them from their difficulties and worries of life. According to him, wherever he goes, he finds people with different kinds of mental, emotional, physical, or other problems and such people in need of treatment are so many in numbers that it becomes the duty of all of us to help them in getting free from these worries. Such patients are increasing with such a turbulent speed that we need to work on emergency basis to resolve these problems. Anyhow, he further states that most of us don’t have real problems and we have just magnified small problems and allowed them to cover with its dark and stressing clouds, each and every corner of our lives. So real solution is not to finish these problems but let the people know that most of their problems are not real and majority of us can live by making compromise with such small problems.
In this regard, he tells us about a young man whom he meets somewhere. The man is healthy, employed and has a good family. He is skilled and has so many other worthy qualities to be happy and contented of life. But when the person meets this young man, he looks so much depressed as if only few hours of his life has been left behind and it is the last day of his life. Usually, we are occupied by worries like financial problems, small health problems, tussles in the family or office life, and similar worries. When the guide sees this man and inquires about his problem, he at once understands that his problem is small and he has let it to intimidate all the good things in life.
The guide takes him on a tour to some places and makes him see and meet some people who are in truly miserable conditions. Then the young man understands that he had made his problem look severe and his small problem had no right to steal the taste from every moment of his life. When the smile on face of the man is resumed, the guide sets on his journey to find the next depressed person.
Although the character mentioned in the story is a myth but I am sure there lived such people who helped others to see the true picture of life and who freed them of their so-called and baseless worries and having a look at our present scenario, when we have to worry about a number of general issues, we are in desperate need of such a person who should help us to see the true face of life.
When we talk of the guide, he had a unique style of asking questions from others. When he understood the nature of difficulty of a person, he bombarded the person with a number of questions that left him with a delightful surprise. Following kind of questions were usually asked, “Do you have any health problem that kills you every moment?’, ‘Is there anyone grabbing your collar to payback his money that you had borrowed?’, ‘Are your children crying at home for food?’, ‘Do you have any strong enemy who is in search of you to kill you?’, ‘Have you killed someone and now hiding from his relatives?’, ‘Have you got stuck in an island where there is no hope of rescue and where there is nothing except grass to eat?’. In reply to these questions, almost everyone shook his head and had nothing to say except to give a faint smile.
Last month, I had a chance to meet one of my friends after a long period of time. Seven years before, when we were in University, he was one of the most delighted members of our group. In more than seven years, he had got married and had three children. But he was no more the same person. He looked very tired and disappointed. Right on the first sight, one felt that he had become the victim of a serious problem. One day, I got a chance to make him sit and tell about his life. He told that he had got married in his relatives and in these years, three children were born into his life. His elder son was of five, followed by a daughter of three and in the end; there was a boy of one. He was very delighted with the birth of his first son but after he grew to be one, he started getting weak and he was diagnosed to be suffering with thalassemia. In this disease, the blood in the body of child started decreasing and he had to be given blood. When the blood in the body of the boy started decreasing, he developed certain dangerous habits.
He would go and eat mud, drink whatever he got and got avaricious about any kind of edible. Many a times, parents were told by the boys that he had drunk dirty water in the street. Then he was rushed to the hospital where he was given the blood and the boy turned normal. But it remained only for fifteen days and after every fifteen days, he would again be taken to the hospital where the fresh blood turned him strong and healthy. After this, a daughter was born and she was normal for two years but after two years, she also developed a strange disease. She lost her balance while walking and would turn around and around and fall on the floor and hurt herself.
The parents could not tie her with the bed so in a day she would fall many times, adding to the severity of already injured parts of her body. In the end, his third child was born and he was again a boy and as feared, he was also having the disease of thalassemia in his blood and had to be transfused with blood after every fifteen days. These words of my friend I will never forget which he uttered with his eyes filled with tears, ‘Many a times, we cannot find blood from the blood banks and someone from the family comes forward and donates the blood. I have myself given blood three times in less than a year and now doctors have warned me not to give any more blood.
I fear what will happen if I did not find blood and left my son dying in front of my eyes. Sometimes, we see that a wound of our daughter has almost healed and we feel happy on it that the next day, she again falls on her wound and it again starts bleeding. Do you know what are the happiest moments of our life; when both of our sons have been transfused with fresh blood and our daughter has not fallen down and we sit together and I kiss and love my children who are both innocent and helpless’.
When I heard his story, I discovered what it meant to be a real difficulty or problem. And it is also an eye-opener for all those who keep crying because of the things that are not actual problems. In the end, I would like to conclude with the words of a famous saint who says, ‘If you did not realize the worth of all the blessings and good things in your life, then you will have to face the real difficulty or problem and then you will realize the true meaning of a problem.’