STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
“The
strongest of all warriors are these two:
Time
and Patience.”
Leo
Tolstoy in ‘War and Peace’
“It
takes twenty long years to become an overnight success!” This was how my dear
friend, and a fellow-trainer, Dr. Deepak, would tease the young ones in our Personality
Development sessions… Yes, to drill into their semi-hard heads, this:
“My young
friends, you need to have loads and loads of patience… You need to wait for the
harvest!”
Yesterday,
another friend of mine shared this conversation on WhatsApp:
Reporter:
“Sir, the farmers’ movement has met with the government 10 times so far and now
they have given yet another date for meeting. Are you not tired? Not losing
heart?”
Rakesh
Tikait (Leader of farmers’ union): “Farmers are
an epitome of patience and optimism. We sow seeds and wait for 6 months to see
it grow. And then, when hailstorm destroys our crops, we are broken, but we
don’t run away. We stay back and work on our fields and prepare for the next
season. The other day I was in Rajasthan, where, in one instance, farmers there
waited for nearly 12 years for rains. Despite losses and long drought, they did
not desert farming or their farm. They stayed back, sowed every year hoping for
rain. And in the 12th year, it rained. That’s the symbol of farmers’
patience and optimism. If anyone is assuming, that farmers will tire out and
leave this movement, they are wrong. We are going nowhere until our demands
are met.”
Whether the
above conversation between the reporter and the leader of farmers’ union is authentic
or not is not the question here. The question is this: Is Patience not the most
important prerequisite for every accomplishment in life?
There is this famous story of Chinese Bamboo...
I must’ve narrated this story in my Blogs at least a
dozen times. And I must’ve narrated it countless times to the young ones in our
training sessions… Yes, just to convey, what my dear friend Dr. Deepak would do
teasingly to them:
“It takes twenty long years to become an overnight success!”
Youth
is a restless period in life. Patience and Youth, by their very nature, do not
go together. After reading my post about Elon Musk, who is now crowned as ‘The Richest
Man on Earth’, one more friend of mine from the US, the mother of two young and
restless sons, wrote in her comment, this:
“Sir, wisdom
does not come overnight, but overtime… after some failures, pitfalls, going
through the fire, trials and tribulations… They (young ones) will get it in
their own time… like us.”
I liked the ‘Like
us’ in the comment above!
It’s a feeling
of deja vu for all parents… Oh, that familiar feeling of ‘Been there… Seen
that… Done that’! Like the proverbial cat, which went on a pilgrimage to Hajj after hunting down and eating a hundred mice – (‘Sau chuve khake billi Hajj ko chali.’) – yes, we all have, now, become wise and pious… We all have, now,
set out on our Hajj pilgrimage!
So, may this
wisdom come the way it always does: overtime and not overnight.
Then alone, you
and I will be able to reflect on our Youth and say what Hal Borland said:
“Knowing
trees, I understand the meaning of Patience;
knowing
grass, I can appreciate Persistence.”
GERALD D’CUNHA
Pic’s: pixabay
Video: 1. Sense of Wonder 2. Led Zeppelin/Kennedy Center Honors/Mark Pakula
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