Pause Please?

"I am in a hurry! May I catch up with you later?"

Why ask when you are actually not giving me a choice? What if I said no? What if I said  "You can't hang up" ?

When I was six, my best friend came over to my place a day prior to friendship day. That was when we were introduced to the concept of friendship bands. The one who has received the maximum number of friendship bands in school would be called the "Most Superest girl" . Hearts were broken on the so called judgement day, tears were shed by the people who could not live up to the prestigious title. My best friend just walked up to me and said this:

 "This one is for you. There maybe many who may tie you this tomorrow. But I want to give you one today. Cause even if you win the title, I want you to remember that it was ME who gave you the first one. I want you to remember me , forever. " 

Even in the age of six when we did not know much about emotions, sentiments and true friendship, those words did not fail to touch me; even more since I was moving out of the city , the following month, forever. It has been almost fifteen years since that day and I have moved from city to city, school to school, but am still in touch with her. This was possible cause not once did she ask me whether she could "catch me later".

Why is it important to pause? Well this is why. Most of our life is categorized into two time-tables. The one that we create (and seldom follow) and the one that we are forced into. Hence we start our day's engine with the first task in our list and keep moving at an accelerating speed, our capacity to work increasing arithmetically  while our work load increasing geometrically. One fine day the engine runs out of energy supply and we collapse . "My Life is  Ruined!" . Now if we take a few steps back in time and see where we went wrong, we will have no one but ourselves to blame. The consequences of an over-worked brain can leave its scars not just in one's academic performance or career, but also in one's relationships and health! 

This is when the question arises; how does one pause? If I am to answer this, I would say that pausing is anything that is done away from your time-table. Pausing is picking up the phone and speaking to a friend you have not caught up with for a long time now. Pausing is watching cartoons for a while instead of the daily sitcoms and probably laugh at how you could be so adorably silly to like them as a child. Pausing is rummaging the old photo albums for  those embarrassing pictures of you or just simply smiling back as your childhood smiles back at you. Pausing is cleaning your cupboard (trust me it works) and finding those old forgotten things that you had once held close to your heart. Pausing is simply the simplest task of all; standing in your balcony, giving yourself the credit for having grown into this awesome person you are today and feeling alive.

So next time your  friend calls up try asking yourself if you really need to hang up or is this call a reminder for you to pause. Because indeed it is things like these that last forever.