Change-ing NEMO

Mama asked us to clean up the CD rack after Iftar yesterday. My parents were in the other room and my sister was going through the day's Tabloid! not even bothering to look up at our frequent exclamations.

It's been ages since we used the CD's in any way, and somehow the rack always seems to go ignored every spring cleaning season. Out comes CD after CD, of games we used to play and cartoons we used to watch. Then a couple of pre-download-era software ones. After we've strewn about almost a dozen over the floor, an un-interesting one comes up; no label, just the BENQ plain original. I discard it and move on, not realizing that my brother has inserted it into his laptop.

All of a sudden the sound of a familiar tune fills the air. I place it immediately as belonging to the animated cartoon 'Finding NEMO', one of the very first of its kind. I whirl around toward the source, and there it is, filling the screen in Wide Mode. I know I'm going to sound like some kind of a brag in explaining its sudden effect on me, or may be like someone eager simply to exaggerate. But the flood of thoughts and memories the very first scene, the very tune brought out in me was astounding..

I was transported back to schooldays, a time when things were diametrically different from what they're now…and yet eerily, just SO similar.

Different because now I'm with new people. It's good to experience change as change is what spells growth. But confronting a set of bogus ideas strong as walls erected in the middle of nowhere, just to trouble passersby, isn't always the most fulfilling experience on Earth. The people, the setting, the whole aura of my life in a new country is the total opposite of life in the UAE. But, I'm still the same person. I'm still the girl full of opinions, albeit nobody wants to hear them now. I've still got the passion for books, but there's nobody to discuss and fuss over silly lines now. I'm still the person who wants to be helpful and 'good', but nobody has time to pay attention, to say that word 'thanks' which has the power to make a bad day turn sunny.

Friends are the glow-lights on the backdrop of life; connecting the dots completes a picture, lays down a path of companionship and manifests an idea. It seemed so simple before…just talk to the person next-seat, exchange the usual questions peppered with huge smiles and lo! you got yourself somebody to talk to, at least. Not so anymore. Think about this, consider that, oho! so-and-so is from that city, I should be careful what to say in front of them!

University has ceased to feel like the 'second home' we're taught institutions -> schools are. Everything seems just so fabricated, all the smiles concealing vitriol and hollow competitiveness behind them. Each look received is calculating; juicing; storing the gossip to be told later. It's much too much sometimes, and I fear turning into the sissy who's always moaning and complaining.

Change spells growth, yes, but it doesn’t always come easy.

Watching NEMO after a long time yesterday acted as an eye-opener for me. The tiny clown fish seemed to be saying to me: it's time to wake out of this gloominess, Alishba, and embrace the beauty within and without. That though some things may seem to be REALLY difficult, nothing is too difficult to endure because God burdens us only with what we can handle, never exceeding the crucial 'tipping point'.

God's symbols are strange sometimes. It's funny to think how much seeing the tiny clown fish again after a long time evoked in me; all I haven’t been able to understand in the past 2yrs conveyed in mere minutes.

So I've decided. I'm going to look for the silver lining beneath the clouds of my new skies. Moaning and complaining all the time is simply not giving life, this single chance we have, it's proper due.

The clown fish has given me a new lease on many things.

I'm beginning to smile already.

I will conquer; my life is my own to live, and who other than me to enjoy it?

“Change is inevitable, growth is intentional "

                                                                               -        Glenda Cloud