When we were small children, we use to hire bicycles – they come in different sizes; quarter, half for boys of our age, three-quarter for boys of my brother and his friends' age, and full size that my uncles ride. Renting it for half n hour was just 30 paise! But that’s not what I wanted to share with you.
We friends then use to have cycle race in the ground that is used to play football in the morning and graze cattles during the day! The race was about who will cross the finishing lane first.
At times, we also had it reversed. The last to reach the finishing line was the winner! Now imagine the struggle to keep the cycle going without you touching your feet on the ground, wrestling with the pedal and the handle, twisting and turning our buttocks on the hard cycle seat balancing it from falling to either side or crashing on to the other!
Who was once a very close friend and my well-wisher asked me yesterday out of the blues “What did you achieve, really?”
There were times I was engaged in the first kind of 'cycle race' in my life. The race was to reach the finishing line first. For years in a row, in every ‘race of life’ that I participated I have achieved just that. Finished either as first or one among the first, in my life in general and in my career in particular.
I am through a time now where the race has changed, for a while. It’s now the slower race, the second kind of cycle race. It’s not about reaching there first. It’s about struggling with the pedals and handle of life’s dynamics to balance without falling and to still reach the finishing line. The paradigm is shifted from being first to being in control and completing the race. To experience the challenges without putting your feet to slow down or quit, or not wishing to race through the lane and 'finish the life off'; to experience the challenges - designed and default - in grace is itself winning, in this kind of race.
The answer to what have I achieved is this:
“I have developed the taste buds to celebrate the sweetness of success, and the ability to understand the darkness of nights as just a turn of a day in the length of ones life which might still turn darker for a while just before the dawn will break.”
Why do we have movies and articles and whitepapers of people who has won the fast race and has had their episodes of slow race too?
Life is bigger than a person. Life is stronger than an event. Life is, in its simplest form, execution of simplest ideas closer to perfection with the noblest of intention.
That understanding is my achievement.
And I am not editing this, nor reviewing to re-write!
