Closing Walls and Ticking Clocks

How often do you find yourself mired in an obstacle, being sucked into a black hole of sorts, trying to pull yourself out of something which you believe even light cannot escape? Apart from just giving up usually at the origins of the problem, there are times when you just put in some effort to convince yourself that at least you tried. You already believe in the writing on the wall, and then you play out your scripted part to reconcile with the premature ending you already housed within.

The bottom line is that most of us, no matter how strong we portray ourselves to the crowd and despite tanks full of projected optimism, find each other cowering in a corner when stacked up against an unknown or known obstruction and resort to what Freud terms as rationalization. We either submit and succumb to the external occurrences or just come up with well structured, thought through power excuses to justify our limitations.

On completing the Monday - *the Term 1 of my PG program with the remnant five terms being the remaining five days of the week and Sunday being the final departure day of my MBA week- of my B-school life I arrived at the conclusion that life and people at a B school are no different. This realization made me first quash the superhuman status that most entrants accord themselves to and then subtly accept the fact that even the ones who we consider to be the best are mere flesh and blood. We all fail. We all are destined to meet failures, though some of us may be dealt with a fine hand and may experience life on an exponential curve, the rest which includes the majority are subject to a sinusoidal journey.

But if everyone is stuck in the same rut of failure then what is it that separates the chaff from the grain, the better from the good? There must be something after all which distinguishes some of us from the herd, and that something is the manner in which we approach the problems. Even the best among us are bogged down at times, but unlike most others they do not ask, “Why?” but they question, “How?” They accept the fact that the situation dwarves them, and then they set about looking for a solution. And I think this is where most of us need to evolve ourselves the most, we have to work on our approach.

Giving up may seem easy, but that’s the job of the average. The extraordinary picks himself up and makes a conscious effort to defeat what the ordinary may deem invincible. And this requires faith, the belief that you can overcome anything. It is nothing but loyalty to self, the allegiance to yourself that you can change the status-quo.

Delving more into this thought reminded me of an incident which involved one of India’s finest cricketers-M. A. K. Pataudi, popularly called Tiger Pataudi. It was unfortunate that he had to lose his vision in a car accident when a shard of glass from the broken windscreen permanently damaged his right eye. The damaged eye caused Pataudi to see a doubled image, and this raised apprehensions of his cricketing career coming to an end. When the man could have given up so easily, when the script was out for him to just utter, he chose not to. He went out to bat against England within six months of this incident with his cap pulled down over his damaged eye, and still managed to score a half century in that match.

Later he admitted that he had a problem spotting the ball because of the doubled vision and missed out the first few balls that he faced, but as he strived more he realized that out of the two balls he saw, one above and one below, it was the lower one which was the real ball and after that it became easy for him to hit it. Just imagine the level of determination the man must have had. We all can but sit and admire his sheer genius and grit.

And to come to terms with the fact that the single most important cause of worry to people around me is where they will be spending their next summers is indeed difficult. Such incidents reveal how small we are, they divulge our imbecility at worrying about the kind of things we usually think about. We need a huge transformation, a death bed conversion to adopt this change. We need to refresh our approach and take obstacles heads on rather than steering clear off them and taking an alternate path. Eventually, it is the approach which sets the aces apart from the rest.

I would leave you with a quote from Marianne Williamson, which is often mis-attributed to Nelson Mandela’s Independence speech, in hope that these words wield some magic on you and force you to at least think about a change in approach if not embrace it. 

*This had to be explained bearing in mind the limited understanding of the esoteric status.