The curly gift

"The gift is ready!", I whispered happily to my colleague. The Secret Santa game was coming to an end. Beautiful gifts were swapped and there were faces beaming with pleasure across the room. I was downhearted when my gift was procrastinated. I could not take my mind off the fact that I hadn't received my gift, but then I decided not to make a mountain out of a molehill. I decided not to over-think and to put my mind at ease, I went ahead to read some stories on Santa’s gifts.  I was intrigued by reading a letter of a Lucy’s mother written to her 9-year-old daughter from the book of “Love, Santa” by author Martha BrockenBrough and illustrator Lee White.

         

The lines of the letter touched my heart and made me calm and peaceful inside as I felt grateful for the fact that I have been blessed with good health, friends, and family.

Days passed and one fine morning, I found my gift on the desk at my cubicle. I decided to ignore it till my work got completed. However, my curiosity gave in and it could not stop me from unwrapping it. I started to unfold the gift slowly and peeked inside. The thought of the gift started tingling my senses with excitement. On it pulling out, it was a handful of slightly pointed and smooth circles around a cone-shaped dome.

The next minute, I felt that my patience had been rewarded by god. The feeling of unluckiness I had until then which I likened to darkness had been wiped out with some light being shed and I suddenly felt good. I realized that every confusion has a solution. The ray of positive hope made me smile.

Pictures speak better than words. So, was my gift. Take a guess!

My colleague questioned me “Why does Buddha have tightly curled coils in all the human sculptures and paintings? The painting had 360 curled coils too.

Questions with How/What/When end up in history. Questions with “why” end up in questioning a happening. Buddha was a normal human being. With my cognitive skills, I felt that 360 painted curls signify the degree of the earth’s rotation and that the universe sends many thought processes across to our head from all directions. May be Buddha only perceived good thoughts and kept the others out, signified by the curls in his hair.

In reality, Homo sapiens is in a confused state due to the pandemic spread of Coronavirus. The curls of the painted Buddha’s head resembling the earth’s rotation in 360 degrees make people keep the fear of pandemic diseases out of their mind and bring the peaceful and happy days to all the humans.

Author: Deepika Jagdeesh