Striving Towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

What is the one thing I could have done differently? I ask myself this, knowing the answer arrives too late to change anything, only in time to change me. It is a question with no answer that will bring him back, and yet I cannot stop asking it, because within the asking is a kind of penance, and perhaps a kind of prayer.

My father carried his illness quietly, the way many carry their deepest burdens, alone and unseen, until silence became its own kind of tragedy. He must have felt the changes in his body long before any of us understood what they meant. And yet he said nothing, perhaps to protect us, perhaps because he, too, believed there would be time to speak of it later. I wonder now how many people carry their suffering this way, mistaking silence for strength, when really it only postpones the moment we might have helped each other.

I did not know. I was elsewhere, in the world I was so certain I could reshape, building something I believed would matter more than the moments I was letting pass. I told myself I was doing it for them, that success would eventually become the very thing I could hand back to my parents, as though love could be deferred and delivered later with interest. I did not see, then, that the greatest thing I could give them was never a future achievement. It was simply my presence, offered now, while now still belonged to us.

I told myself there would be time. That someday, when the business was built and the world a little more changed, I would take my parents on the journey I had promised, and simply be there for them, for as long as they needed. This is the quiet lie that ambition tells us: that the people we love will wait, patiently and indefinitely, for the version of us that has finally arrived. But life does not wait for our “someday.” It moves in its own quiet way, indifferent to our plans, and takes from us precisely what we assumed would always remain. It does not consult our calendars. It does not wait for convenient endings.

None of us are given to know how long the good times will last. We live inside them as though they are permanent, mistaking the absence of catastrophe for the presence of forever, only to discover, in hindsight, that they were always borrowed time, quietly ticking down even in our happiest, most unaware moments.

I understand now what I could not understand then: life is not something to be postponed in favor of some better, more convenient later. It must be lived now, in the only moment we are ever truly given. Not the now of grand gestures reserved for someday, but the small, ordinary now, a phone call, a visit, a question asked and truly listened to. These are not lesser forms of love. They are, in fact, the only forms of love that can ever be delivered in time.

No one can tell us the length of our journey, or whose turn comes next. We cannot control who leaves, or when. That truth is not ours to hold, no matter how tightly we try to grip it, no matter how much we bargain or plan or promise ourselves otherwise. But what remains within our hands, entirely and only, is this moment. And the moment, it turns out, is the only time we ever really have. Everything else, the world-changing, the wealth, the well-intentioned someday, is simply borrowed against a debt none of us can guarantee we’ll live to repay.

So perhaps the lesson my father left me, without ever meaning to, is this: love does not ask to be perfect or eventually delivered. It asks only to be present, today, while today is still ours to give.