Yesterday morning, I was hurrying to deposit a cheque in the bank when I saw a tiny black stray puppy on the side of the road. It had a collar on, so some shopkeeper was probably caring for it. A fellow passer-by had stopped to play with it. A big smile spread across my face and I longed to stop a few moments and play with the puppy too. It was just adorable! But I was concerned about depositing the cheque, and so I thought, “I’ll play with it on my way back from the bank.”
The bank didn’t accept my cheque (it was apparently not a teller branch), and on my return, the puppy was gone.
Later in the day, I decided to walk down to the opposite side of Connaught Circus to deposit the same cheque at another branch. On my way, I saw a fruit seller with the largest, most gorgeous pomegranates I’d ever seen. Since I was in a rush and didn’t want to carry the baggage, I decided to buy them on my way back. But once I’d managed to deposit my cheque, due to some reason, I took another route back to my office. There. No pomegranates.
Zara, the trendy fashion store, has a policy I recently learned about. If their stock of one style of clothing sells out, they do not replenish it with new stocks. They just move on to newer styles as per production plan. “So if you see something at Zara,” my informer told me, “just buy it. Don’t assume you can come back later and it will still be there.”
How many times have we let go of a precious opportunity at love or joy because we assumed we could ‘always come back later’? The very nature of Nature is change, movement, fluidity, evolution. Nothing is ever, ever going to be the same as we saw it before. Even we aren’t going to be the same two hours or two days later. There are some second chances we are never going to get.
Next time, I will stop and cuddle the puppy.
100 Paths 