When you deserve something, you get it. The universe is an abundant place, which imparts you more than you deserve and much much more than you desire.
Respect is a value that is bestowed from the heart and can never be begged, borrowed, or stolen. It is only a virtue to be earned when someone showers this upon us. To get respect, it takes a plethora of stones to be piled up, but it might be very easy to take one stone off and let that pillar fall. Easy to lose what had been earned and piled up.
As easy as it is to lose, harder it gets to be earned. Earning and achieving are hard, and it comes straight from the heart when you should truly get it.
It has happened to me once, and that incident has left me learning that respect is not begged but earned. Respecting your elders should be the teaching, but respecting those who deserve it should be the learning. It shouldn't be borne out of caste, gender, creed, or sex.
I had immense respect for a friend of mine, due to the hard work he had put in, in our cultural program. It was due to his efforts that the team was motivated to achieve and strive for more.
The whole event was a success and what followed was a congratulatory speech by the president of the society conducting the event.
Everybody got a chance to speak and then came the protagonist, and the backbone to the event. He began speaking about the team, but his speech slowly diverted to being narcissistic.
What was a team effort became a self-proclaimed achievement. All of us who had slogged together felt cheated. What respect I had for him, shattered. Shattered like a glass, that could never get back to what it was. It gave me chills down my spine.
He had done everything which made me feel like that for him. But one action truly made the other things vague. It was enough to undo his past actions. That day even today, I still hold a sense of respect for that person but it isn't what was original and from the heart. There is now a vacuum that can never be filled.
Respect is like rain, showered only when the effort of sunlight gathers enough clouds, you can never force it. And when the result of sunlight is enough, the petrichor of the rain of respect is enough to scent the surroundings.
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