“Everest is not a mountain you climb in a day” said Krushna Patil second youngest Indian woman who had summitted the highest peak. She had said this in her interview to HT on last Sunday. And we got to trust and believe her because she has achieved what many cannot even dream of. Similar sentiments can be echoed for any other project that we want to achieve in our life. Our dreams and desires ,our aspirations and ambitions can be achieved provided we know what we want and how do we approach life to go for it . It may not happen in a day certainly but if and when we are able to achieve this, it will give us a great high as it must have given to Krushna when she had summitted the peak for the first time .
It is an agreed fact that a positive and objective mind set is the prerequisite to high achievements in life but besides the positivity of the mind it is also the preparation of the spirit and body to put in our best of toil, sweat and tears in the achievement of any task that we set out to do for ourselves in our lives.
They say that Rome was not built in a day but they should also say that Rome was built by intelligent planning and foresight , by deploying men and material who had toiled for years together to build a town we commemorate as Rome today. The beauty of Rome obviously attracts all of the mankind today also to utter such epithets for its praise.
I am tempted here to borrow another sentence from the article of Colleen Braganza ( the article appeared in Hindustan Times June14, 2009) where the author writes about the summitters of the Mount Everest , ” You do not conquer Mount Everest .The mountain allows you to climb her “. Life too allows us to live it the way we want to live . A good , healthy, peaceful life full of happiness and mirth for all. However as the mountain does not allow any climber to take to it lightly , same way the life expects some seriousness from us . The mountain wants climbers to have respect for its highs and lows , the peaks and slopes and walk over them with a climbers’ discipline; same way life too tells us to develop a healthy attitude towards the ups and downs, the stills and the movements that our day to day living brings into our folds. It wants us to adopt a salubrious attitude that displays neither overt exhilaration and jubilation over the minor achievements nor a depressing passivity and submission to the major upheavals . The life will then expect us to get into the nascent hope of climbing yet another of its peak after coming out of the previous palate of high or low served by it to us on the platter. The climbers many a times have to strategically assess their position on way to the peak of the mountain and decide whether to stay put at one place , to move forward, or even take a step backward to let the weather clear up before they start climbing again . The same way we too have to devise our strategies to meet our career and life’s ambitions. Moving forward appears good and keeps everyone associated with us happy except possibly our healthy rivals. But it is always the stagnation or the need to take a step backward that causes ripples into the society in which we live and spend our 24 hours everyday. It could either have raised eyebrows or the depressive sounds of false sympathy.
But the warriors of life and the climbers of the peaks should not pay heed to such sounds and ripples . They should rather rededicate themselves to the task of building up bridges and tunnels again to clear up their road to success and glory that life allows them to achieve .And to do that we will have to first of all take out the fear of losing out.We must not allow our minds to get coloured by the elephis of suspicions and doubts on our own capabilities .We must clear all kinds of cobwebs of non achievements from our mindsets by believing that we and only we are capable of bringing magnificence and greatness back into our lives by the solemn commitment to build up our lives again.
Practically there is no one who has not been hit hard by the recession. Its vagaries can be seen from the dwindling crowds on the shop floors of shopping malls, to the shortening of the queues on the airlines check-in counters, to the shrinking of the kitchen and household shopping of many families on account of their reduced incomes. The economies of not only the businesses but even the common families have gone hay wire. The salary slips suddenly vanishing lead to bank balances and savings vanishing in no time , but giving in to the pressures and adopting a passive attitude can further aggravate the problem and one can get into depression. So what do we do ? Many of us will obviously pose this question .
The best thing that we can do is to take it in the correct perspective that it is time to either upgrade or to diversify our skills . There must be many things we had not done in life before but have always talked about doing , to our friends and families. It could be expanding on some hobby, taking to some other profession related to our skills or it could be even upgrading our academics . But that can be organised only if we remain positive and objective in our approach towards every thing in our life.
I have always spoken about getting into teaching in a business school to my family and friends during my long career of 28 years in marketing. Yet I did not have the courage to quit the well heeled and oiled job.Though I had been adding my own bit to the education field by writing three books on Marketing and getting them published by the best publishers of the world , as a hobby . All this had been done during my tenure as a corporate manager. I had also picked up an additional degree in management almost ten years ago more to satisfy my curiosity about new concepts in management rather than anything else.
Recently when I had faced challenges in my corporate career, I looked at this juncture in my life as a God sent opportunity to convert my talks into practical action. I had prepared myself to take life head on and fight back the negativity of a depressing recession. The first thing that I have done is to adopt a positive attitude. This positive attitude is all prevading . I do not allow my family also to get into any kind of negative reminiscensing of the life that we have just had and left behind. The result is that I have got a great opening for myself into a profession that I had always wanted to get into i.e. teaching in a good business school. I also have another book of mine ready for release withing a week or so. It is obvious life has turned better once again. It is definitely the positive thinking that has activated the law of attraction in my life. I wish all of us get inot the positive thinking and attract the best things of our choice into our lives.
Think positive , get up and get going is all I can wish all my friends . Believe me that every good thing that you have ever wanted will start materialising the moment you turn positive. Just get going.
Mankind has always courageously and fearlessly faced all kinds of extremities, annihilation, natural calamities and man-made disasters. Many a civilizations have gone down the mounds of earth or into the annals of fire on account of atrocities committed by one tribe over the other. Many a nations have been virtually eliminated from the surface of this earth by the cruel hands of time. Yet man has existed and grown from the pre-stone age to the modern jet age due to his resilience, the stronger willpower, steely determination and the fortitude to get back yet stronger and more powerful. The human minds have been made all the more potent and effective by each stroke of adversity. In this entire game of playing hide and seek with death and destruction man has never stopped empowering himself with the inbuilt armament of resolve and tenacity. The recent upheavals of financial misfortune are nothing when we all think of the wealth each nation possesses today. We today have in abundance the wealth of young and inquisitive minds, the wealth of shared knowledge and the wealth of international cooperation in construction and rebuilding of the disintegrating institutions. What we need to have is the faith in humanity, the love for individual and the respect for human capacity to put back in place the lost kingdoms.
I am reminded of a small incident of my early childhood days when we used to live in houses with lots of half open ventilators in each room. Young birds and sparrows will find it very convenient to build their nests in small nooks and corners of the rooms in our home flying in and out of the half open ventilators. Their chirping and singing the bird tunes always sounded like a sweet music to our adolescent ears. But these birds were also creating a nuisance for our mother who used to be very meticulous and fastidious in maintaining cleanliness all around the house. Each season it used to be a constant fight ensuing between the young birds and our mother. Our mother will direct the servants almost once a week to throw away many kind of tidbits, the cloth cuttings, the broomsticks and the small paper shreds that the birds would collect to build their nests behind the curtain rods, the ceiling fans’ canopies and the top of the wooden cupboards. The poor birds will look at my mother and her retinue of servants pitiably and sadly asking for some kind of mercy to spare their small worlds so that they could lay their eggs and bring into this world their inheritors. But to no avail. Does that mean that the birds will fly away? No way, these birds will stay put in our house and with a re-determination will begin bringing in more material discarded by the denizens of the man’s land to build with it their nests again. Within a few hours, next morning these birds would build their shell again and look chidingly at our mother. Eventually mother had to give in and allow them to stay in there till their youngest ones were hatched out of the eggs and had grown strong enough to fly out of the windows. She would in due course start the same exercise all over again with other pairs of birds the next season.
But what message my immature mind could understand and imbibe was that a small frail bird had more firmness, persistence and tenacity than many of the humans. It did not get discouraged. It would not get disheartened and depressed even when her or his entire world had been destroyed. It would simply get up and get going without giving the catastrophe a second thought, because it knew that the life is too short and beautiful to be allowed to be destroyed in dismay and despair. One must just get up and get going …………..
