Inner Compass – Shalini Sareen – Life & Executive Coach

Lessons from The Musk Melon

“Miracles do occur”. I had read these lines often but when I personally experienced one in my own lifetime, I finally understood the implication of a miracle. It led me to an understanding of  the presence of a higher energy in the universe, that is beyond the comprehension of our mind, and something which needs to be experienced, in order to be understood.

I grew up in a North-Indian household and nurtured a strong bond with my father. My father was extremely affectionate, magnanimous and a patient man despite being highly accomplished. He lived in the hearts of his family and friends. One autumn, he had fallen very sick and had to be hospitalized. On one such evening in October, in the hospital, he happened to have asked me for a musk melon, complaining that his mouth was beginning to feel very dry. Although, we tried at every possible store, I was, to my despair, unable to get it for him. After his sudden and unexpected demise, I was flooded with a surge of sadness. Having taken a sabbatical from my work, to be with him, he had literally become a part of me, with my world navigating around him, making the loss even more unbearable. Amidst such feelings of aftershock and emptiness, under a sense of allegiance, I found myself taking a vow, along with my family, to not eating a musk melon ever again or agreeing to not buying or bringing a musk melon into the house, thereon.

Years passed, we changed cities, moved houses, changed jobs and life moved on, without anyone of us ever eating a slice of musk melon; all this while, feeling our Dad’s presence guiding us. A couple of years down the line, on one such cold Sunday winter morning, as I was sitting  in my garden, reading a newspaper; to my unbridled excitement and shock, I had a realization that the basil pot was nurturing, apart from the Basil plant, another small plant, on which were hanging, two small tennis ball sized fruits……there were “two tiny ripe succulent, sweet and juicy musk melons with those unmistakable green stripes”.

Being an avid gardener myself, I knew how hard it is to grow musk melons, let alone growing it when they were not planted in the first place. Multiple thoughts ran parallelly and one such thought that I remember us debating over, in particular, amongst ourselves, was whether the seeds of some eaten-up musk melon found its way to the pot, but that theory had no steam either, as no one in our family, had ever brought or eaten the fruit, since his demise. To this date, how the musk melon plant grew and found its way in the pot is unknown and soon became irrelevant. The fact as to how no one noticed the presence of two fruits sprouting, growing and ripening, made that moment of discovery so much more unforgettable.

We believed that a miracle found its way to us and that we, each one of us, as time passed by and as it finally started to sink in slowly, the profundity of what had transpired and what it meant to us individually. Maybe it was our dad’s way of collaborating with nature to gift us the musk melon and in his inimitable style, of teaching us to let go of our sadness and moving on to celebrate the abundance and joy of having a musk-melon and the joy of having him and his memories.

To me, perhaps, that was one of the last few lessons that I needed to learn from my dad, that of letting go. By acceptance of what has transpired just the way it was meant to be, by learning to forgive and having compassion for self and others and by simply focussing our attention on being grateful for all the good memories, it became so much easier to let go.