What’s your story of struggle?

 

 

“Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities. .” - Daniel J. Boorstin

 

The wriggle of an earthworm on rough land does evince us of some sort of struggle. So does the bloody swim of some types of salmon upstream to find love (read: mating). And also, the flight of millions of birds down south for the winter. Every organism on the surface of earth has a story of struggle.

Quite similarly, and yet so differently, we humans have great stories of struggle too. Books on history have had us reading about men over the ages who had struggled to make something of themselves. Yet the most common of struggles is the unseen. It is the struggle we face each day with ourselves. The fight we face with the one who is you, and yet will not let you be yourself. Its amazing how we expect our loved ones to treat us as we are and 'let us be' when we cannot do it ourselves.

Think of this. The people you want to be with, but simply cannot. The group you think you are most like, and yet you cannot be one of them. The dreams that we harbor so deep, and yet they slip away each moment. The naive, optimistic half of our selves that tell us to surge ahead and not worry about the risks is often shadowed by the street-smart, pessimistic half that pushes you to play safe. The voice in your head that plays out a thousand sequences whenever you are faced with a decision. The memories that dwell and parasitically leech upon every moment of today. Its all a struggle. And its all internal. One of the shoe giants summarized this in an ad campaign some years back "Its you V/s. you".

The struggle is not to be greater than yesterday, the struggle really, is to be present in this moment. The struggle is not to think any less of yourself but to think of yourself less. The struggle is not to love less, but to love more and risk losing it all. It is not the things we perceive on the surface level that trouble us, it is the spiritual side of things that we all see from time to time and are scared by what we see.

But with this struggle comes pain, comes rejection. We are often faced with people, choices, consequences that push us against a proverbial wall. And yet there is much to be gained from this pain, from this rejection. Maybe it is the naive, optimistic half of me that is writing this now, but there is a lot that one learns from pain. People familiar to the science behind bodybuilding would know that the real growth of muscular tissue happens post the breakdown of fibers. It is post the breakdown and with proper nourishment that one gains musculature. Not too different from that is the science behind our personal growth. The breakdowns in our lives are there for a reason. It is the nourishment post the breakdown that lets you grow. And yet, we wallop in our misery and find a weird joy in remaining miserable, instead of nourishing the mind to recoup.

Another cripple that we run by, that snatches the struggle from us is the ease of procurement. We constantly seek templates for work, we seek precedents to do any task assigned to us. We find so many shortcuts to do a task that we forget or do not even learn the way to do the task normally. And in the process, we achieve a fleeting success. The kind that leaves you unsatisfied. Louis Binstock said this in a way that makes more sense “Too often the shortcut, the line of least resistance, is responsible for evanescent and unsatisfactory success.” Enough said.

Being present is hard. Being in the moment and committing every ounce of energy and drive to what you are doing at this moment is not easy to do. But it is the struggle to achieve this that drives people to greatness. Superior athletes that compete on similar grounds do not lose because they prepare any less, or that they are slower, weaker than their counterparts who win by a whisker. After the line of ability has been crossed, it is the state of 'now' that makes winners. Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi spoke about the concept of 'flow' through his research. A state of mind when the body is on autopilot and yet performs better than the mind can will it to perform. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. We have all felt such moments of 'flow' in our lives. The struggle is to be able to turn this flow on and off as we will it.

The learning, if any, from the struggle we see around us is quite simple. We see it in the people we meet everyday. From the most common man you meet each day to the extraordinary humans that chance upon our lives every once in a while, they are all in a state of struggle. It is in our nature to be. The lesson is not the struggle itself, but the stage of comfort one gets into from taking on the struggle. Change is tough, and unfavorable change is tougher. Getting to a state when you can 'roll with the punches' and yet win the fight is a struggle. It is what we all aspire to reach. At least it should be.

 

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Words

 

The broken windows of the room let a cold, dark air sweep through. He sat there, alone. He only awaited the next cold wave. To awake him, to make him move. Wave after wave, cold breezes gushed at him and broke against his slouched frame. He did not move though.

Her words resonated in his ears. Words that are seldom used to describe a person you love. Words that are used one at a time but in his case, were used all at once. Words and phrases like 'complacent', 'lazy','wasted potential', 'never took risks', 'unmotivated', among many others. Like a statue should remember the cuts that chipped away the most stone, he recalled these phrases as the ones that hurt most.

Another cold gust swept through the room. A chill ran through him and the hair on his arms stood up to protest it. His thoughts, though, remained with that morning. She had moved away. She packed her bags that morning and left the house, but somehow she had moved away much before that. He did not blame her. She deserved a better life, and the man she now loved, would provide that life.
He looked out of the broken window pane. A frail tree in the distance was swinging violently with the gusts of wind. With each toss, the tree seemed to get weaker. It was as though it had given up, and was now only waiting for the final blow that strikes it down. They were much akin, him and this tree. He recalled the last happy moment he spent with her. It seemed so long ago. One weekend, she had come home with a packet of cake mix. She wanted to learn to bake. The look on her face that day was worth a man's life in hell, if that's what it cost. Her eyes beamed, her words did not stop flowing, her hands were trembling with excitement and her voice oscillated between varying tones of energy. It seems so long ago now.

The streetlights outside his window flickered with the cold wind. He did not realize that he had been sitting in the dark. He also did not realize that he had left the radio on. A voice echoed through the room. It was another song, but somehow it was not just any other. Tear drops rushed to his eyes as if to distract the memories that were conjured up in his mind now. He brushed them away; he had to.

The cold air was getting severe by the minute. He cupped his head in his exasperated hands and took a deep breath,  filling up cold air in his lungs. He arose from the seat with a jerk, and mindlessly went to the storeroom. He returns with a hammer and a small plank. Deftly, and carefully, he nails the plank to cover the hole in the window pane. He switches on the lights and the heater. He walks up to a desk and writes "Complacent, Lazy, Wasted potential, Never took risks, Unmotivated" on a piece of paper. He pins it on the wall above the desk. Life, as he knew it, would not be the same ever again.

 

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