It was a rare Saturday evening. My husband and I, hardly get our weekends off together—thanks to our profession. The life of a doctor is not easy, especially, when you are junior doctors and are assigned duties that involve 12-hour shifts and on weekends.

That Saturday we had an off and we were looking forward to it eagerly. We had everything planned. We ordered breakfast and lunch online and prepared our room for a movie binging session. It was everything we wanted after months of tiring days at the hospital. To make the day even more relaxing, my husband ordered a spa service at home. We didn’t even have to move a finger. Thanks to technology, everything was made so easy and effortless.
But as the day progressed, a strange sense of restlessness started setting in. On the dining table were boxes of half-eaten food. We sat in front of the television as mindless silence surrounded us. Flipping through the channels that showed the same old movies, we could feel the boredom getting large.
“Let’s go out somewhere?” I said to my husband.
“Now? It’s already 6:30 pm,” he replied in resignation.
“We have been sitting around doing nothing the whole day. This is not how I wanted to spend the day!” I complained.
“What’s wrong now? Didn’t we have everything that we wanted? Just lazying around doing nothing. It’s a perfect day. Isn’t this what you wanted?” he asked.
I didn’t even make any effort to give him a reply. Instead, I got dressed and my husband reluctantly followed suit. We were just seven kilometers away from the Yamuna banks and as we drove down the distance, I could feel the air changing.

The stuffiness was gone and in its place was something different. Yes, there was pollution. And we had to cover those seven kilometers in more than an hour because of the traffic. We reached a park which was near the river and we could see the city skyline from there. The horizon looked beautiful.

I had never seen a midnight blue sky in Delhi. Unlike the hills, the night sky here is almost a dark amber, as if there is a big fire burning at the place where the sky ends. As we watched the sky changing colour, a strange sense of relief descended on us. We felt happy. It took us a while to realise that things that make life easy, does not necessarily make it happy. For happiness, we need to travel the distance the hard way. And it took us just seven kilometers to reach our spot of happiness that day!

-By Shruti Mehta

Source: indiatimes.com