Mind Gaps

6th July 2015

This Saturday morning Rayaansh my 1 year old was in the middle of his “waking up” process. We have a morning drill where usually he’ll wake up disoriented and while he tries to establish his co-ordinates,I’ll ask him if he stretched? His face will brighten into a faint smile and he’ll give a lazy stretch. Then based on how hungry he feels the crying routine will follow. I then ask him about his dreams while I kiss and caress him. Some days he begins to fill me on his dreams in a language I wish I could comprehend while the rest will be spent on inspecting the eco-system. It’s our happy mornings.

So this morning, he is having an animated conversation with me when my FIL walks towards my room calling out my son’s name. My FIL had just returned that morning from a 2 week long business trip. Instantly I see Rayaansh stops his stories and his smile just vanishes. I was surprised, as I had expected him to be excited on seeing his grandfather. With an urgency, he swiftly sat up to spot his granddad, he gave out a big cry and immediately climbed on top of his yet asleep father to reach his granddad. In the process he started crying, the real cry which included tears in his eyes, held his granddad for a few seconds and then amidst the tears smiled and hugged him again. It was a warm moment of unadulterated expression.

I realized that he missed his granddad and didn’t know where he was or when he was to come back. The moment he heard his voice, he didn’t hold himself back to express what his heart felt. That purity of the moment touched me and I felt that growing up sucks.Soon this clean innocence will be replaced with calculated reactions. As we grow,we just stop expressing our innermost feeling. Our mind comes into action and creates this gap between what we feel and what we express. The innocence slowly gets covered into these layers on mind created gaps. The London metros frequently announce, “Please Mind The Gap”, I guess it symbolizes such mental gaps as against the physical ones that we find.

We never really grow up, we just learn and master how to react in public