As I looked to upgrade the
technology of our PC from the old to the new, I came upon an app the boys
already knew about. In my excitement I complained, “Why didn’t you tell me
about this before?” Our younger son, always quick with his repartee told me,
“Mom, when it comes to technology, you are still buffering…”
I was laughing so hard, I
couldn’t take offence…just the vision of myself trapped in the ever turning
hourglass, the little spinning wheel and the ever so slow increasing scale of
the buffer was and still is enough to make me chuckle.
It was a very profound analogy on
so many levels. In the four years since Shekhar, I have had to reconstruct
everything in my life. Every day when I feel more confident about something, I
am equally frustrated by the lack of progress on another. It is hard to build
when you are trying to leave space for someone who is no longer there. How do
you accommodate a memory? Still I have soldiered on…stretched, challenged,
redefined, fallen apart and put myself together again. I have no long term vision now, no five and ten year
plans like I had with Shekhar, so in the true sense, I am still buffering for a
life in the absence of a better half.
As the boys achieve new
milestones, grow out of their schoolboy skins into young men…I have realized
they are buffering too…for new beginnings, challenges and adulthood. We are all
works in progress. As a salute to the times, where technology defines your
vocabulary...buffering for me now is just another name for living.
***
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real
life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got
through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be
paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
Father Alfred D’Souza
