LIKE THE TREES IN WINTER

Pic.: Natrajan Ramsubramani

If we want to achieve anything in life, accomplish any task, we need to be determined to achieve it. We need to pursue it with a single-minded focus and a passionate heart.

Ever since I stepped out of my college, I have been very alive to this inner chemistry of achievement. I know, that the starting point of any achievement in life is our burning desire to achieve it, coupled with our total commitment to do it… with passion and persistence. When we are young, the success slogans such as “A winner never quits and a quitter never wins,” get into our system like a war-cry. “Thou shall never, ever quit” – yes, we take it like a commandment from God… the God of Success.

My belief in the above success philosophy hasn’t changed at all. I know, for sure, that, to achieve anything in life, we need to be determined and passionate to achieve it. We need to commit ourselves fully and passionately go about it with loads and loads of perseverance. Yes, if we give up, when faced with small blows, we will never be able to accomplish what we want to.

The only problem here is, that, in the process of being passionate and persistent, we, also, tend to become blindly and compulsively obsessive about what we want to achieve. We, also, tend to become ‘perfectionists’… And, because we try to achieve ‘perfection’ in an ‘imperfect surrounding’, our obsessive and compulsive approach will only bring stress, anger and misery in our life.

Trying for perfection in an imperfect world – as Stephen Covey had beautifully pointed - is like trying to arrange chairs on the decks of a sinking Titanic!”

I was fortunate to get hold of ‘The Serenity Prayer’ early in my life:

“God, grant me courage to change things I can,

serenity to accept things I cannot…

and wisdom to know the difference.”

It is so peaceful when we realize, that, in life, we cannot change ‘everything’ even if we try with the strength of a Hercules. We need to let go some things… just accept them. Just the way the trees do… They know the truth, that unless they shed the old leaves, the new ones will never come… Jeffery McDaniel had said:

“I realize there’s something incredibly honest

about trees in winter…

 how they’re experts at letting things go.”

Our suffering and misery are the outcome of our resistance. Yes, resistance to those things we should have learnt to accept instead of trying to change… We hold on to even our suffering and misery… because we tend to hold on to our familiar experiences in life. We fear the unknown… Let me conclude this Post with what Thich Nhat Hann had said in this regard:

“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering.

Out of a fear of the unknown,

they prefer suffering that is familiar.”

  

GERALD D’CUNHA