Oh, yes! All my favorite stories began in this manner during my childhood days. ‘Once upon a time’, and ended with a ‘happily ever after’. But then, does life bring these ‘sentences to life’ for each one of us? I’m afraid not.
We have our set goals, our dreams, our ambitions. Our quest for love. Yet, as we grow up, everything suddenly changes to numbers. It’s about how much we learn, how we pay our bills, what amount should we set aside for our next road trip, the number of deadlines to be met, and so much more.
Age is also a number. A woman’s happiness (or discomfort) in our society revolves around when she should be getting married, at what age she should bear children, and the age number even dictates what she must adorn, or how she must behave.
Once upon a time, we explored creativity to the fullest. We spun long tales out of a web of words in modest notebooks. Once upon a time, we didn’t even have to count the number of friends despite the non-existence of social media. And definitely, it was once upon a time, when happiness didn’t mean a trip to the mall.
Today, no matter how successful and happy you are, you aren’t truly successful until you have lakhs of followers on social media channels. Your popularity is defined by your followers even if a majority of them seem to represent fake IDs. It’s the age of numbers when quality is left far behind. We are so busy chasing the number of visits, the number of likes, the number of shares, that we forget our sense of purpose. For some, the sole purpose of life is updating a Whatsapp Dp or Facebook profile pic and waiting breathlessly for the pings or comments to flow in.
So, do we allow these numbers to dictate our lives? Professionally, our lives revolve around it, doesn’t it? Yet, I’m sure there are many out there who beg to differ and prefer the quality of life over anything. So what if we are behind in the rat race. I’m sure not everybody wants to belong to it anyway!
Till then, we can also wait for the ‘happily ever after’. But, then, isn’t ‘happily ever after’ so ‘once upon a time’?
Something to ponder….
