"Melon Seed"

"Melon Seed"

When I was very young, I received lot of praise from adults for my talents. I would always get flattering complements and rewards that the other children would've done anything for. I tried to be as humble as possible, but I was young. I was discovering all these talents of mine that not everyone possessed. Eventually, all the praise got to my head. I became fond of belittling and criticizing people. One day, I went to a relative's funeral as soon as I got out of school. My emotions were mixed, I was both angry and sad. Angry because one of my classmates got me off and sad because I had just lost one of my closest relatives. I tried to keep a poker face so anyone wouldn't notice, but my uncle managed to read me. He approached me and asked " Aside from this, is something bothering you?" I told him about my classmate, her stupidity, arrogance and how she managed to make me so angry. I told him about how she was hopeless in life and would never succeed in both material and moral ways. There was an expression on my uncle's face, I couldn't describe it accurately using words. However, I think that it was the kind of expression that  said, "Tsk, tsk." He led me to a table and said, "Take a seat." My uncle took a melon seed and put it on a white plate. "What do you see?", he asked with a strange tone. " I see a melon seed." , I replied. He sighed and said, "You look at things too narrowly. You only managed to spot the small melon seed. Now had you broadened your view, you would've seen the plate as well, which is undoubtedly hundreds of times larger than the seed. Sometimes, you tend to focus on the small, insignificant things that a person might have just because they're centered. Because of this, you fail to see him or her as a whole person and jump to conclusions. You don't see the plate because you're focused on the small melon seed."