The Missing Tile Syndrome

Imagine yourself, sitting in a newly constructed room. You looked up and you see such a perfect tile ceiling. However, while you are admiring the ceiling, you notice one tile is missing. From then on, no matter how beautiful the ceiling is, you can’t fully enjoy its beauty just because of one single missing tile.

You finally called the maintenance and have the missing tile replaced. After that, you now have the perfect ceiling once again. Now, let me shift your concentration on our lives today.

All of us have something that we don’t have. Those are the missing tiles in our lives. There are just some tiles that no matter how hard you try, it can never be replaced or fixed.

The missing tile in the ceiling can be replaced and once again make the ceiling look perfect. But sadly, there is no such thing as a *PERFECT life.

You will never come to the point that your ceiling will have all have the tiles.

There is a big DANGER when you concentrate on the missing tiles in your life. It can make you dissatisfied, ungrateful, remorseful, and unhappy. At this point in time, you might be suffering from the Missing Tile Syndrome.

A regular day – waking up, shower, breakfast, office, back to home, some family time, dinner, back to sleep, this is a normal schedule every common person follows. But even in the packed routine humans tend to fall in the various trap of the missing tile syndrome.

Have you ever been like “I wish I were__”? The blank space may have included a number of adjectives, for example, thinner, smarter. etc. I am sure you definitely would have thought this to yourself at least once till date.

An accurate and self explainable example for the very concept was given by Mr. Dennis Prager, who also presented the whole concept, is while sitting in a room, looking up at a tiled ceiling, you notice that one tile is missing – just one what would you concentrate your vision on? What would you look at the most? The answer of course is the missing tile.

Now just consider your life in the place of that ceiling and that missing thing in your life in the place of the missing tile. Isn’t it a very identifiable example, something each one of us can easily relate to the missing tile from the ceiling can be very easily be filled by fixing a new tile, but the same is not every time possible in our lifes because both of them are poles apart.

There’s one more important difference in knowing the scenarios, which is that a missing tile in a ceiling would not have any effect but that in a life will definitely have a huge effect on our lives and a big one our HAPPINESS.

Our constant concentration on the ‘missing tile’ of our life will do nothing but diminish our happiness._

Contributed by: Col. Prakash Tewari

Feature Photo: Photography by Prof Dr. Ashutosh Kar, KIIT University, BBSR, Odisha