Backup vs Humility

In a freewheeling conversation with a colleague not too long ago, she regaled me with a storytelling class she attended. Instead of subjecting herself to the vagaries of life – which undoubtedly offered many reasons to put off taking the class, even making the idea sound almost sacrilegious, she gently assuaged the voice that was seeking to thwart her plans. In other words, she gave ‘backup’ the finger.

What is backup? Backup is security, money in the bank, ancestral property, more money in the bank, paid vacation, a paid sabbatical, retirement, to name a few. Backup entails waiting for life to make time for that elusive storytelling class. Backup is critical and not be undervalued. But the problem with it is it’s never enough.

Here’s what is needed in significant amounts – humility.To accept that your current job will precipitate early onset Alzheimer’s, that your marriage is a farce (if you’re headed for divorce, it would do you good to divide your backup by half ), that been you’ve been living a lie, that you’ve unwittingly lived someone else’s life. If you use backup to push humility into a corner, the chances of ever taking a leap are as remote as an America that genuinely cares about the well-being of the world.

When humility overrides backup, you do what Ray Bradbury advocates:

‘If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.’

And you'll find you need to resort less to storytelling as a means to to cover your lack of a bias for action.

Comments

When an Iyer met an Iyengar

If you see my parents, they look like the quintessential arranged marriage couple. After nearly 35 years together, they still take care not to touch each other while posing for a photograph and my mother’s smile dangles precariously between a smile and a grimace. But this image discolours the truth a tad. Some 40 years back, they met at work, fell in love and got married. The talking point of the union being mom’s status as an iyengar and dad’s as an iyer. Simply put, the iyers and the iyengars are two castes of the Brahmin community, each, when given the chance, profess superiority to each other on all counts. If you listen closely, an Iyengar talking about an Iyer will say ‘Iyer a?’ in a condescending tone. And vice versa. Mom tells me that when she told her dad about the marriage, he vowed to stand by her at any cost. Dad never told me what happened, but allow me to hazard a guess. His mother (my grandmother), threatened to go on a fast unto death. My dad threatened to go ...

The sculptor and the stone cutter

A story is told of two bricklayers laying brick on an afternoon when one wished the sun would scurry back behind the clouds and offer a smattering of respite. This very ordinary scene caused curiosity to get the better of a passerby in search of conversation. As the story goes, a question was posed to each as to what they were building. One replied he was merely laying brick. The other said he was laying the foundation for a cathedral. Ostensibly, the purpose of this story being recounted time and again is to get us to look at dreary tasks with a sense of reverence. And maybe, just maybe, they can turn into a masterpiece. Maybe this zealous approach is the distinction between the humdrum existence of a journeyman and that of an enchanter, who in Jack Kerouac’s words, makes everybody go ‘aaawww’. Which is why there are such few masterpieces, be it a song, a book, a movie, or a sportsperson making the field his stage, keeping an audience of a million glued to...

Meet Ronnie

Doctors are a strange lot. I should know, being a sibling to one. Most of us spend our education and subsequently, our lives, chasing elusive rainbows. Our formative years are spent willing the clock to move faster and for classes to get over. Medical students spend their formative years cutting open human bodies (the dead ones) and one fine day, graduate to cutting open live ones. It was this strange fortune of having my elder sister choose medicine as a career that introduced me to Ronnie. As a part of their learning, medical students are supposed to go to a designated store near their college and buy a very unique set. This very unique set consists of a skull and a few bones. They then sit in class, hold the skull in their hands, and listen to their lecturer explain to them about the neurocranium and the viscerocranium. Cutting cadavers, it may be presumed, is slightly more complicated and cannot be delved into with the same hilarit...

Someday, today will be nostalgia

Search This Blog