Life always presents us a variety
of options, from which we can choose. If we make right choice, it leads to
success and happiness. The wrong choice leads to failure and misery.
I would like to emphasize on the
importance of choices that one makes consciously or unconsciously in one’s
life.
A few hundred year’s ago in India
lived a saint called Goswami Tulsidas. He was very much infatuated by his wife.
When his wife had gone to live with her parents, Tulsidas realized, he just
could not stay without her. He started off to meet her. But since it was a
stormy night, there was no boat willing to take him across. He found a log that
he held onto and swam across, and then found a rope hanging from the wall,
which he grabbed and climbed up to jump through the window into his wife’s room.
He thought his wife would be pleased to meet him. But she scolded him for doing
such a nasty thing. She said in your infatuation for me, you did not realize,
that it was a dead body which you mistook for a log and that was a snake that
you assumed to be a rope. She said the amount of love that you have for me if
you had a fraction of it for lord Shri Ram, you would have achieved him. That
scolding Tulsidas received from his wife was a wake up call for him. At that
moment he decided, i will no longer allow my mind to remain in this degraded
state. He decided to take action. He turned around engaged in spiritual
practice and devotion and transformed himself to the great Goswami Tulsidas who
wrote Hindi Ramayan.
That one choice, he made at that
particular night, had such a big impact on his life.
The choices that we make have
short term or long term consequences. Will today be the day when you will
decide to choose wisely and transform your life like Tulsidas did? You may ask me, is life transformation so
easy that it is the consequences of a single choice ? Absolutely not. Alongside
with the choice, is the intensity of the decision.
How many of you know about a real
hero, karoly takacs and his real story. He is the third known physically
disabled athlete to have competed in the Olympic Games and was the first
shooter to win two Olympic gold medals that too with his left hand after his
right hand was seriously injured.
That committed choice of his
enabled him to inspire. So it is not only choices we makes but also the
commitment to these choices that enable us to make our life, either more degraded
or happier.
