Week #3
̶D̶o̶n̶’̶t̶ give up on your dreams
Thanks Debbie downer. If you continue to read after this extremely disheartening title, kudos to the malleability of your brain and I shall reward you with a story.
Once there was boy, who was skinny and weak. He had inherited good genes and was smart, plus as a child he did the best that he could. He chose his parents correctly. The parents weren’t conventional parents. They had their own dogma and biases but overall their choices impacted this little kid with bronchitis in a positive way. He went to classical music classes, learnt how to draw, read books, went to acting class and did sports. It might not seem much now but in the era when the boy grew up, this was not conventional. The other family members frowned upon the boy’s parents, “he doesn’t spend enough time sucking up to us” was a common refrain (I am paraphrasing here). But the parents were fully invested, with their limited financial resources and their limited time which was spent making those financial resources, one thing the boy never lacked was support.
Of all the sports this kid did(roller skating, table tennis, lawn tennis, running, biking, basketball, football(ugh.), gymnastics, taekwondo, kickboxing), he liked swimming the most. He was competitive, he liked to win. The boy, as it turned out, had this tendency to keep his feelings bottled inside of him. He was angry at the world, for how they treated his parents, for how they treated him. After all, the boy was smart and the kind of smart which caused more harm than good. He was smart enough to know things were going wrong but at the same time, smart enough to know that hitting someone in face with a frying pan is illegal.
Winning was cathartic. Practise too. Things which got left unsaid were visible in the way this kid competed. The problem, however, was this kid lacked the courage to follow through. He could talk a big game, he could even work hard but taking the last step, firing that bullet, he really had a hard time doing that. Life went on and the kid’s life was full of traumatic failures. In retrospect, all of them were his own faults. Despite not having a choice in some situations, the choice to act was still his choice (just like writing this extremely convoluted sentence was my choice.)
The kid screwed up his engineering entrance exams, partly because he didn’t want to be an engineer in the first place. But he still went to engineering college, where there was more self-loathing. And then he started a job which, as it turned out didn’t suit him either. But he self-loathed and compensated by running. As it turned out, running was even more cathartic than swimming. It was easier to run than to swim given the lack of equipment required. It was like a magical elixir the kid had found. He went from one place to another, trying to find meaning in his life while seeking support from running.
Initially, the kid looked like this:
The kid changed countries, where he got an opportunity without people holding him back through their dogma and it was here the kid became an adult. The adult could see that his life was more than just a bunch of competitions and races. The adult could see that until he really expressed how he really felt, it didn’t matter if he could run a marathon in 2 hours and 10 minutes, his relationships would falter no matter how fast or how much he ran. Adulthood was hard for this him, he was depressed and even suicidal. In the end, he realized he was being a drama queen and that life sucks for everybody. Or rather life sucks only as much as you want it to suck. (that’s what she said.)
He decided to take the blame for everything that was happening to him on himself. This adult started work on himself, on expressing himself in a more vocal way. But he also loved running, for it was not just mere catharsis or competition that drove him, it was the time for contemplation. (fucking alliterations.)
He loved running because of something primal within him. Something which he couldn’t put his finger on. He was surrounded by people like “Leonel Reis”, people who complained about the wind and the size of their spikes. People who wore their PRs as tattoos and people who defined themselves by the number of miles they ran. Some people, who like him could not or did not want to deal with reality of life and so decided to hide in the unseemly left-foot right-foot motion.
And then he could not run. He could but it hurt like motherfucker. The adult had his dreams of doing something with his one talent that he had discovered and as he aged he began to lose all hope. He dealt with it in the best way possible, he tried everything in his power from rest to recovery, he switched sports and he spent thousands of dollars on treatments. But it just wasn’t getting better and the adult was just annoyed. And then it hit him. Despite not having that one thing that drove him out of bed, everyday for 3 years, that got him out of bed was when he was lonely, when he wanted to kill himself, when he hated the people he was going to work with, when he knew his day was going to be shitty and when he knew life wasn’t making any sense. Despite not that having that, he was still alive. He had developed, through the years, through the mélange of hobbies, through his critical selection process of friends, through his inherent rudeness about all thing superficial, a method of surviving anything and everything. He realized he was more than just numbers.
In that abyss, he found freedom. And he found a realization. In the immortal words of Sri Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagwad Gita:
“I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to
consume the world. Even without your participation,
all the warriors gathered here will die.”
(11:32)
Time would bring him to was he destined to be. Whether he chose to act or not was up to him. Whether he chose to stand and mope around, or whether he chose to act and stop treating this as a major tragedy was up to him.
In college, Keira D’Amato ran mediocre times in the NCAA championships. She was injury prone and “she could have had surgery to correct the underlying condition, known as a tarsal coalition (an abnormal bridging of bones in the foot), but her health insurance would not cover the surgery, so she retired.”
She took a “real job” in 2009 and through the money it afforded got a surgery. In 2016, she gave birth to her 2nd child. In 2017, she ran a 3:14 marathon. And last week she broke the American Female record for the marathon, at age 37, running 2:19.12.
Vincent Van Gogh was disgusted with his first attempt at drawing at cat at age 10. So much so that he didn’t draw again for almost 2 decades. At age 17, he went to work as an art dealer for his uncle, then decided to become a clergyman but didn’t succeed despite working his hardest. With pressure from his family, he decided to take one shot at drawing and discovered that while he could not draw, he could paint. From the time when he started at age 27, to his untimely death at age 37, he painted over 1000 paintings, 4 of which went for sale at values north of 100 million dollars.
Frances Hesselbein took her first “professional” job at age 54 and is regarded as one of the most influential leaders of all time in American history, having won the presidential medal of honor for her leadership work with the Girl Scouts. She is 106 now and is still actively consulting.
My point is this, fuck anyone who tells you that failure is not an option. The only thing in life which can be counted as a failure is your inability to learn from the previous failure. Also, no one who ever became successful in life was like “Leonel Reis”. They didn’t rest on their laurels, their life “Strava” profiles didn’t reflect every single race they ran and their personal best time. Their profiles were a reflection of the multiple failures they had in life and how they overcame all of these failures to become unprecedented successes.
So if you have a dream, giving up on it is not a failure. Life is not written in cement. Your life is a free flowing river, full of opportunities. Crisis and Opportunity are 2 sides of the same coin and it only depends on how you choose to look at them. So go ahead and fail in life, it is the way you will succeed.
I am in this situation today because I ran 16,000 kilometers in 2 years and yes, it is very easy to tell me that it was my fault. But you know what? It was. However, I am still a better athlete than most of you and the lessons I learnt from destroying my body, the circle of people I developed as a result of destroying my body and lessons I will use when I come back will only make me a better athlete.
Failure is not an endpoint. It is a stepping stone for something better. So go ahead, live your lives and don’t ever be afraid to fail.
Rant of the week:
I did 2 rants last week and I don’t want to come across like this:
Even though I am actually exactly like that. Most of what I do is complain about people complaining. But I can’t help it. Anyways, I’ll spare you a rant and instead skip right ahead to the pictures from this week.
Pictures from the week
Of all the places in Switzerland, my 3rd favorite place after Montreux and Zürich, is Bern. The capital city of Switzerland is the perfect amalgamation of city infrastructure and nature. The forests surrounding the city are beautiful and the city even has a 800m high hill just a stone’s throw away.
You can see the Bernese Oberland Alps from the top.
And can shoot pictures reminiscent of the Windows XP wallpaper.
And really get a nice hike without going too far away from the city.
Anyways, Bern is incredible and really worth a visit.
Thank you for reading and ok, for this week if you have reached this point I will give you some homework:
Try something new this week. Try something which scares you and at which you might fail. (Don’t try bungee jumping without a rope). If you succeed, don’t bask in the glory but instead explore how you can get better. If you don’t, rejoice in failure because you had the courage to take the first step.
Peace.
