A place for Life's serious Businesses

"Gap between the response and the stimuli"...Makes all the difference. While reading the Stephen Covey's Seven habits of effective people, I stumbled upon the line that explains about the gap or space between the response we make to a stimulus. The more we are in this space, the better we respond. It is a way to exercise and building the patience muscle. It is in this space that the wrong, as well as the right decisions and hence the actions, are made. These lines, Stephen Covey claims, struck him fresh and stuck with him ever since. I write these lines now, in a dark space,during a power cut, in peace. The realizations are many. Firstly, the book reading happened when Steffi was sleeping and I was sitting close by her, for she was having fever and chills. The doctor advised rest, good food and as anyone would guess, a few pills containing paracetamol. To provide her the peace, I had to ensure an environment that was peaceful for her, at least peaceful enough to enable her mind and body to enter a brief slumber. In doing so, I discovered the peace too, after a long time. Steffi, caring enough to not let me be bored, asked me to watch TV if I wanted to, but I chose to read, and hence the peace continued to exist, both inside and outside the mind, and the reading went on and these words are being typed here. A place for serious businesses of Life. While reading the book in absolute peace, I realized, all over again, that we all need a place, a well kept one, to deal with the important thoughts and aspects of life. A place in which introspection and reflection would not be interfered by the noise of the daily earthly routines. A place, say, to reflect on the journal, to sit in dark and see the life with the eyes closed, a place to read good books, a place to write the book which others would read in their respective peaceful places. This idea is definitely not anything new. We all know this, I knew this before, you knew this all along. All good principles and ideas are just like this, and this is best put by borrowing a line from the same book, "an idea whose time has come", an inward revolution.