The dead old tree

As I walked on the road unaware of where the world was headed towards, something caught my attention. It was a dead tree standing erect by the road. What interested me was the way it had been dying a slow death whereas the world around him was yet so green. My eyes lingered towards it's branches, there I saw leaves caught in transition, they were neither green to contain life nor brown to talk of despair. The colour was a shade of yellow with specks of dull green . Did the green in them yet had hope to continue being alive? I asked myself.

Then I saw something which moved my heart for the tree, it was home to birds. Little chirpy birds seeked shelter in its dead trunk. How strange life could be, that tree housed life yet couldn't forsee it's end.

A cool morning breeze made its dry branch rattle and one of its branches snapped. I could see a man hurry past the road. Before I could actually take hold of what was happening, I saw him drag that branch along with him and my mind whispered, "Wood, it's plain wood for him". So, that was it. The irony of life. The moment you die, that very moment your equation with the world suffers.

We spend our life fearing the unknown, working day and night to deal with the unfamiliar whereas we turn a deaf ear to the familiar around us. We take things for granted and when tragedies befall us, we gulp the pain down thinking it was what the unfamiliar had held for us. But what about noticing the dead tree in us which is rotting each day, a silent death, violent enough to signal a dead end. Our branches from life keep on snapping in the form of lost hopes and battles and we get reduced to that old dead tree which knows to exist yet is not alive.

Do we actually deserve the pain or is it that we never want to think of it as pain altogether?  Why can't we be the specks of green of those yellowing leaves? Well, life is short and we can't be that lucky to expect the whole world to follow our designs but what can be done is to not to get reduced to a dead tree.

Each morning as I pass by that tree, I keep on hoping to see that speck of green alive in those leaves and as I am thinking of it sitting in my room, my heart flies to that old tree which stands by the road in this winter night robbed of hope and life!