‘Ramayana’ is one epic tale that talks about keeping the mind sane among the doolally and dudgeon. If Lord Ram would have thrown an insouciant tantrum about the ‘delay’ in finding his beloved wife Sita and be the recluse de trop of imperfections, Sita would have died burdened, in chagrin, decrepit in the dystopic empire of Raavan.

But, that was not to be!

Ram knew how to fight; not the exuberant anger that deprives the soul of equanimity but applying a discerning mind that accepts the fragility of time, and that there is an appropriate time for things to happen.

A desultory by the time is ‘delay’ and we all fight with it like disgruntled dead ducks, dander dancing on our heads. Lord Ram accepted ‘delay’. He never tried to put wheels on time by showing anger or discordance. He moved around imperfections that could be perfect in their own sense but was alert to not present it as proscriptive. Was it so easy for him to mount on the army of monkeys’ and find solace that the victory is inevitable? Or the intoxicating winds that coerced him to log back to ‘Ayodhya’ without achieving the desideratum? 

The ‘delay’ did not faulter at all! So what kept Ram going on? It was to live with imperfections; not to surrender to it but to analyze the perfection in it to decide the appropriateness of the et saq.  

Let’s take the recent example of the recent dilatory by Indigo Airlines that kept the passengers wiping their precipitation on the aerobridge. Was it their fault? No! Yes, the ‘delay’ was inevitable. The passengers locked all because of the ‘delay’ and the dilettante begins; the result—deride, denunciation & desultory. And, of course the faux pas! The passenger in the aircraft discriminately blows a crackling slap on the pilot’s face interspersed as rude and insulting. Hasn’t this anger ensued from the obnoxity to the ‘time sauerkraut’? We are more worried about the devilry of the deuce standing in front of us who is actually a mere pawn in the chessboard of untimely directions. In this case, it’s the pilot who is being looked as the imperfect credo. 

Why aren’t be reflective? Could something have been different? If the passenger had been slightly quiescent to be the ‘bravado’ like Lord Ram, the crack by the hand whip could have been avoided.

So, how is the mind required to make a perfect sense of the imperfections around?

By accepting that other’s ‘perfect sense’ is in work too! Giving it that niche, the time would stand still and what we call ‘delay’ would just be an ‘acceptance of time’.

How about the scornful look on the hard-lined face of the teacher when the student has delayed in submitting his homework? She seems victimized, isn’t it?

‘A delay’, she snorts!

She sweeps through the ear of the ‘prisoner in deliquescence’, pulling it hard to know the reason for ‘delay’. The student has reservations to express as usual but anyhow, its story will always be a damp squib! The teacher’s mind has been trained to be disciplined and be a no-nonsense for any effrontery. ‘Delay’ in homework is a conscious trigger of indiscipline for the teacher; her imperturbable anger does not come out as an emotion but a transfixed memory of perfect channelization of ‘how’ & ‘what’ she is teaching. The student’s imperfection has an engraved truth that’s seems obsolete and amusing.

Can something happen differently?

Lord Ram knew that ‘delay’ to provide Laxman with a panacea after being pierced by the ‘Brahamastra’ will lead to his untimely death. Anguished by his own imperfection of being indiscernible at that time, he finds perfection in the didgeridoo arpeggio of the Monkey God, ‘Hanuman’. He trusts him to get the herbal remedy to awaken Laxman from the spring of death and the et saq—we all know, ‘a mammoth mountain of herbs’.

The teacher too in this case needs to trust why a delay happened and what little can be done to avoid it. If in the place of a ‘tiny herb’, Lord Hanuman can fly across a huge crate of herbs, then the proficiency of the student altogether cannot be neglected. His imperfection can make perfect sense if is he is considered ‘distinct’ and is ‘trusted’. Thus, a ‘delay’ would no longer be a ‘delay’; the time would stop by, yet attune to the ‘trust’ in the ‘truth’ of the moment.

If the ‘disruptive’ has a plan then what do we do to let the combative spirit in ‘me’, ‘myself’ assuage? Not many awaken to the ‘delay dendrite’; it has become a part of life but our evaluation of it in our reactions is no less than a diatribe. We ‘scream’, ‘fiddle with the extremities’ and are champions in the ‘blame game’.

A ‘delay’ in any realm of our life is a ‘de trop’. However, the sapling of time in the path of the ‘time lost’ can be the ‘Ram Setu’; finding solutions to what can be done better to avoid the ding-dang and the drubs & drabs of the complacent anger and pride.