"House to let. Self-contained with communal pool and sunken bar". A story is told of a young lady who wanted a house then came across the above notice in a local newspaper. She undertook the necessary procedures and eventually moved into the house. Every evening the lady could go to the pool, undress and go ahead to take a long swim before heading back to her house. All this while, she thought that all the other tenants did not appreciate the purpose of the pool, since she was the only one who spent time in its waters.
The young lady was the arrogant type and any person who made any attempt to speak to her was dismissed rudely. This made all the other tenants to keep off from her and she enjoyed her cold evening swims for days. One day, she received a visitor who asked her to accompany him to the bar. “There is no bar around here. They lied to us on the notice," she answered her visitor. "No one lied to you. You are the one who did not read the notice carefully. The bar is in a basement in the middle of the courtyard," the visitor told her.
They walked across the courtyard to a staircase leading to the basement. Just in front of her was the most beautiful bar she had ever set her eyes upon. She walked in and saw all her neighbors inside. She looked upwards at the roof and she was shocked to see the swimming pool through the transparent roof. She came to realize that all that while; her neighbors had been watching her take her nude swims through the roof of the bar.
The story is related to what many of us go through in life. Many times we come across a big number of people cursing the world and life itself. Many even go ahead to heap blame on themselves, others and even on God for their troubles. Like the young lady who failed to read the notice carefully and getting to understand the message in it, many of us make hurried decisions depending on the situations that we are in. We make major decisions on relationships, jobs and our personal lives depending on many unlimited conditions without making any consultations on areas we are not getting clear.
In life, we often fail to understand that we are not the first ones to undergo the problems we encounter. And in failing to understand this, we often keep our problems and inadequacies to ourselves while forgetting that there are millions out there who have passed through them and lived to give pieces of advice on how to go through the problems and even evade them before we get into them. When the young lady in the story failed to allow her neighbors to interact with her, she let herself into a vulnerable situation whereby everybody was seeing her swimming naked while she thought she was enjoying herself.
Just like the lady, we defiantly block out good meaning people from our lives because we feel that we are mature and are able to make independent decisions concerning our lives. If only we could give some little room to accommodate others in our lives, we could avoid a lot of embarrassment and even pain. What if the young lady could have just given one of her neighbors some time just to say, "The pool is on top of the bar". Her embarrassment could have been avoided in less than ten words. She did not even have to neither answer to that nor ask a question.
In our lives, it depends on many factors for a realization that we are on a wrong path. Like the visitor who took the lady to the bar, we always try to justify our shortcomings by putting blames on everything we feel that we can attach our misfortunes to. The lady tried blaming the notice for not giving her detailed information. She does not realize that she could have asked for the location of the pool when she was moving into the house. The lady would not like the next new tenant to undergo the embarrassment she felt when she got into the bar and realized that everybody had been seeing her naked. We should also take that cue and warn others before they make mistakes in their lives.
Finally, I believe that in life people learn from their mistakes. And the first time one happens, I call it a lesson. We should take some lessons from our mistakes so that we would be able to avoid them in future and even advice others who are in our past situations. It does not hurt listening to what the meek have to say. They might happen to be the answer to our problems, or even the prevention to an approaching problem.
