WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR...

“What we see in Life… is what we are looking for!”

 

Exams are approaching, and, one of my students has been giving sleepless nights to his mother. “I have forgotten everything… I am blank,” he has been repeatedly telling her, “I can’t give the exam.”

The mother is shocked. “You have attended the classes for a whole year… Solved so many exercises, given so many tests… and, now, you say you can’t give exams?” She is yelling at him.

Two days ago, the mother came to meet me and described to me her plight.

“What happened beta?” I asked the young-man, holding his hand, gently.

“Sir, I have forgotten ‘everything’,” he said with the meekest voice.

“Don’t worry beta, it happens sometimes before the exams,” I tried to pep him up, “We still have time.”

“Beta, you don’t have to take any tension,” the mother joined, “just try your best and give the exams.”

“But, mom, I can’t… I am blank!” he, again, screamed, “I don’t remember anything… Nothing!”

“Well, you do remember, dear… at least something!” I pressed his hand.

“No sir, nothing,” my student emphasized.

“Do you want to?” I asked lovingly.

“I know, I can’t,” he, once again, stressed.

Some thirty-three years ago, when I had just come to this big city trying my own luck here, I was filled with self-doubts. One side of my heart was dreaming while the other was crippled with self-doubts… fear, anxiety and nervousness had dominated this side of my heart… so much so, the dreaming side of my heart was left intimidated… ‘I can’t’ had overpowered ‘I can’… Every day I would leave home with this sort of battle constantly waged in my heart… I would return home, defeated.

It was during this period of my struggling days, I chanced upon a book on the roadside which was to change my life for ever… rather, my ‘I can’t’ sort of thinking. Yes, this book gave me the single most hope: “Whatever the mind of man conceives and believes, it can achieve.”

Napoleon Hill’s famous classic - ‘Think and Grow Rich’ - was this hope…

As my young student kept crying ‘I can’t’, I remembered my own anxious days… Napolean Hill had provided in his book Walter D. Wintle’s this immortal poem:

“If you think you are beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you'd like to win, but think you can't
It's almost a cinch you won't.

If you think you'll lose, you've lost,
For out in the world we find
Success being with a fellow's will;
It's all in the state of mind.

If you think you're outclassed, you are:
You've got to think high to rise.
You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the one who thinks he can.”

I did not mention about the book or the poem to my student, who had, by all standards, chickened out…

“Do you want to pass in this exam, beta?” I, again, asked my student, gently.

“I want to, but…” he was still doubtful.

“Keep saying strongly, passionately ‘YES’, if you want to,” I advised him, “how you say, how you desire… yes, they get unmistakably re-enforced in life, dear.”

And, that applied everywhere in Life… “What we see in Life… is what we are looking for!”

This young man needed to look for success… He needed to believe, trust… and act. His ‘I can’ voice needed to be louder and stronger than his ‘I can’t’ voice…

What could his mother do?

What could I, his teacher, do?

Napoleon Hill was long dead by the time I picked the pirated copy of his classic on our city’s pavements. Perhaps Walter D. Wintle, the poet, much before that… And, yet, their words brought about a miracle in my own life…

“According to your faith, you shall be given.”

  Now, you know how many years ago 

Jesus Christ had said this!

May this, too, be added before I rest my case:

“In Life, what we hear... is only what we want to!”

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pics.: Girish Gupta