How many of us are attached to materialistic things? A boy is attached to his car, a girl is attached to her doll, a teenage girl is attached to taking selfies, a teenage boy is attached to his game hub center, a woman is attached to her new born child, a man is attached to his work, an old woman is attached to her love, an old man is attached to the picture his wife left him with.

Attachment is a very dangerous yet wonderful sin. Philip Martin once said, “Our suffering comes from our attachment to people and things, our repeated attempts to find something lasting where there is nothing lasting to be found.”

Yes sufferings are directly proportional to attachments. It is true, and we all know it. When a man suffers, his attachment has everything to do with it.

When we are attached to something, we are obsessed over it. We want that thing at all times with us. Why? Because it is a part of our happiness. We do not know how it becomes so important but once it is, it becomes difficult to live without it. The phase of being attached to something and not having it is something which we refer to as the suffering. The suffering has many kinds of impact on a person, it can damage the person or it can make the person stronger. Now, it depends entirely on the person which impact would the person prefer. If a person wants to be damaged or miserable a person’s actions would be such. The damage which an attachment causes is something abstract. We do not know how it pinches us daily reminding us of what are deprived of and how badly we need it.

She was 43 and a mother of one, rather a step-mother, as they call it. He loved her son more than she could ever love anything else. She did everything for the boy when he was a boy and continued to be by his side even after that. The father couldn’t take the adultery issues of his son and threw him out of the house. She made it a point that her son wouldn’t sleep hungry neither at day nor at night. She wanted him to follow his father’s footstep and achieve the highest stature of success, and he did, after a lot of hardships. He was a successful businessman in a foreign country, at a company which he owned. The father when was informed about his son’s success was very happy and proud of the same son he threw outside that shelter he still resides in. The step-mother on the other hand, smiled and shed a tear.

Years passed, the couple’s son got married, had children but never visited. After ten long years, one night the father’s cellphone rang, on the other side was his son, sobbing to how he missed him and how he had always remembered him. After some emotional exchange they hung up the phone, eleven minutes later. There she stood, behind her man, with a smile, and asked, “How is he?”, the man said, “The way you wanted him to be, Thank you”. She smiled, and so did he, they knew, he would’ve never acknowledged her, but he knew what she had done.