Till I was in boarding school, Diwali was put aside as a festival of lights in my memory bank. I never got an opportunity to celebrate festivals at home. However, my childhood image of Diwali got diluted when I got exposed to Diwali celebrations outside the school boundaries. To my shock, it felt more like a festival of noise and smoke than lights.
Yet, Diwali still fills me with excitement, as while buying mitti ka Diya, I am transported back to memory lane of my childhood days when we played with mitti ka gharonda. It used to be so much fun. However, nowadays, I hardly hear about it. The creation of beautiful rangoli adds to the flavour of festivity. This time of the year allows us to revisit- our long-forgotten cupboards’, drawers with things that we hardly touched ever. Before Diwali, we intend to declutter and clean our homes to welcome the goddess of wealth-Lakshmi on a no moonlight, also called Amavasya.
As time passed, I also witnessed a change in trend where people are becoming more conscious of what they want to do during Diwali other than bursting crackers. While Diwali is viewed as a time for togetherness-meeting and greeting our friends and family, it is also perceived as a relevant time to declutter and clean our homes. With this, a thought comes to my mind quite often-why not declutter our minds too at this auspicious time?
Isn’t it as important as decluttering our homes? If our minds are a running train of thoughts – that never stops, then we might be constantly caught in the web of negative thoughts, painful emotions, memories of the past that hurt us. In such a case, we are not setting ourselves free from the past. If we declutter our minds, we might enjoy every moment of the festival with family members.
I perceive inner cleaning as more important than outward cleaning only. For what is the benefit of scrubbing the house thoroughly when one is resistant to scrub out the not-so-good part of ourselves that we are not proud of.
While festivals are times to celebrate, it also gives us the reason to sneak our time from our busy lives. It is crucial to be socially connected to people qualitatively where what we are attending to are people we love and care about, not our gadgets for a day. It reminded me of the recent advertisement by amazon prime where they showed that shows on prime would be there tomorrow also, but Diwali comes only once a year so, spend time with your family for a day. I liked the way an important message was conveyed-let our loved ones in their lives know that they matter by giving our undivided attention.
For more such moments of celebrations in coming years, let’s try to burn our ego instead of bursting crackers. Let’s declutter every nook and corner of our minds to live in the present moment. For pandemic taught us a few lessons loud and clear-to live every moment by being in present, enjoy every moment of our lives and, hope for the best but prepare for the worst as life is as unpredictable as life itself.
So, why worry about things we cannot control! Allow yourself to enjoy the sweet fruit of hard work you might have done in form of cleaning and decluttering-most importantly when you have taken a challenge to not only declutter your house but decluttering your mind too, to allow space for happy images, memories, incidents, situations to fit in, in our endless storage system such as mind.
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Happy Reading 🙂
Best wishes,
Pallavi Sahu
Fireflies : Sprinkle of Tranquility 
♥️
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