“Life is a wonderful circus my son, you have to be centred and you have to be on the edge, all the time. And you have to push the edges with all the energy you can muster. Every cell of yours must become a juggernaut, an indomitable force of formidable strength. You have to crush all the barbed wires on the way. Life is beautiful son, like music! But you must strain, strain every nerve, every fibre, every muscle in your body and your brain. Never forget this! The best music comes only when the strings are taut!”

– (The crazy fiddler’s diary)

 

Tom Hanks is one of my favourite actors and I must talk about the movie “The Terminal” It is a 2014 movie directed by Steven Spielberg. The film is about an eastern European man (with sparse knowledge of English), who gets stuck in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport terminal when he is denied entry into the United States and at the same time cannot return to his native country because of a military coup. Caught in this weird situation, Viktor has no alternative but to come to terms with the fact that the Airport Terminal is his makeshift home, till his situation is resolved. He befriends the people across the terminal. By careful observation, he learns ways of making money- like collecting all the passenger trolleys and stacking them together earns him a certain amount per trolley. His ingenuity with remodeling a wall impresses an Airport contractor who hires him into the construction work going on at the Terminal. He also learns English in whatever time he can spare for himself. He helps a fellow European who is stopped from taking a medicine out of the USA for his ailing father. It is illegal to take this medicine out of the States for a human being, but it is perfectly legal if it is for an animal.  By reading the fine print Viktor is able to make use of this fact, convincing the man to say that he is taking the medicine for his GOAT. The officials are chagrined because they know it is a subterfuge but they can do nothing with nothing to prove and knowing that the man is well within his rights to the medicine. Apart from the laughs that this scene generates, it is also one of the most touching scenes.

The point I am trying to make here is that sometimes life throws you into extremely adverse situations. It calls for all the motivation, all the energy, all the courage, all the ingenuity you can muster to barge head on into the adversity and emerge triumphant. Viktor is a quintessential example of a person who embraces the pain (pain is not necessarily a physical thing, adversity is also a pain, uncertainty in this case where your identity has been obliterated and you do not know where you next meal is coming from is one of the most painful of all things) Viktor shows grit, resilience, perseverance and stretches his acumen and ingenuity to battle it out. Every day is a struggle to survive, a struggle to reconstruct one’s identity, a struggle to deal with callous bureaucracy and the impersonality of rule books. The strain he faces is colossal, but his spirit refuses to get crushed, his mind never losing the sight of his goal for which he has come to the States, to fulfil the last wish of his deceased father.

For most of us, life is not so cinematic, but that is no reason for us to slouch into complacency. We have to embrace strain. Cliché as it may sound; we have to burn the candle at both ends. We have to squeeze the milk of time to the maximum.  The great Japanese Author and runner Haruki Murakami say about running “Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive–or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself.”

And Straining is an art. Imagine that Strain is like an asymptotic curve, a line that will keep approaching the elastic limit but will never reach there. We have to strain ourselves like that line, keep going till we almost break, but we don’t. Whatever we managed to salvage just in the nick of time, we have to carry forward to the next day. Add it to the kitty of our latent energy to be harnessed. But it is very important to keep up with the flow and the rhythm. If this is a race then the only opponent you have is the “you” from yesterday. The “you” from today has to be better than the “you” from yesterday. There is no backtracking. There are no detours. And never assume that you are past your prime. P G Wodehouse was a prolific writer till the ripe old age of 93. Scarlatti wrote over a 500 musical pieces towards the end of his life.

This is what Angela Duckworth the Author of Grit: Passion, perseverance and the science of success has to say– “There are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time―longer than most people imagine….you’ve got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people….Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it…it’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love―staying in love.”  I like the last part the most. Truly it is easy to fall in love, but staying in love is not a cakewalk. When we fall in love (here I am talking in context of our work), it is like going to a movie where we are fixated upon the happy ending. If we are watching a movie at home, it is all the more easy; we can fast forward through the boring parts, Songs (in case of Bollywood movies) and hackneyed melodramatic scenes. Not so in real life, we cannot fast forward the boring bits. We have to stay in love with the whole ensemble our work brings us. We have to fold our proverbial trousers and get there deep into the grease and grime of our work. We all are where we are, because we are smitten with the happy ending our work offers us- by happy ending here I mean the Vision, the mission and the objective we want to achieve. But we must love the boring bits with equal vigour and zeal. We cannot sleep through them and let them take care of themselves. We have to “eat that frog”

And assuredly there will be more than one frog. So as Brian Tracy the author of “Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time” says if you have to eat two frogs, eat the uglier one first. This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you; you start with the biggest, hardest and the most important task first. “Do not sit on the pile of your tasks till your head hits the roof. Be on the top of your tasks. You have created your tasks. Do not let them turn into a Patchwork Frankenstein monster; you have to end up running away from.  We should sharpen our attitude like a knife sharpened over a whetstone. According to the great Austrian Psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor – “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Even in the most adverse conditions, when everything is lost, we should have the grit and the tenacity to not surrender our attitude. Even under the most exploitative and the most depraved conditions of existence, everything can be taken away from us- our assets, our property, our means to livelihood, the lives of our near and dear ones, but one think nobody can ever put a dent in- is our attitude, which can remain invincible, when our life is in the doldrums.

And when everything is hunky dory in life, we have other enemies to fight off – Mediocrity, complacency and meek acceptance. These words do not exist in the dictionary of the great self. We must cultivate a mind-set of extravagance, of opulence, of abundance.  And we have to strain ourselves and endeavour with an indefatigable spirit to achieve what we believe and conceive. To quote Neruda “As if you are on fire from within and the moon lives in the lining of your skin” You have to live with the fire perpetually burning inside of you and with your bones creaking and muscles aching. Soon enough the aches will become a part of your muscle memory, a surrender to the strenuously and painstakingly crafted version of you – The Great Self. We are already happy. We have to change that. We have to be GREAT.

We do not have to strain to be happy. We have to strain to be great. Happiness is our natural condition; The bedrock of our life. It is where we start our journey from. We have to go beyond comforts, beyond, familiarity. We do not have to seek balance in our work and life. Work and life cannot be compartmentalized or segregated. They blend into each other like hydrogen and oxygen to form the molecule of Greatness. Grouch Marx says “Outside of a dog, books are man’s best friends, inside of a dog it is too dark to read” While this proverb is witty and will earn a lot of chuckles, we need the insides as well as the outsides. We need the dogs as well as the books. We need everything. We need to think inside the box, we need to think outside the box and this shall not suffice. We have to break the box and release the immense energy trapped in such compartmentalization. We have to see the beautiful lady in the picture and we have to see the old hag as well. But that is not all, we have to break the barrier and see both of them as beautiful.

If we have to metamorphose into something Great, we have to embrace the leviathan of pressure and pain. Carbon does not turn into diamond out of a trifle. There is an alchemy of immense hard work and pressure. We have to be the alchemists of our own life. Alchemists working away incessantly to distil in the collective laboratory of our body and mind, the elixir of Greatness. There is only one kind of MAGIC in this world and it is in knowing that there is none. What we are left is more life-transforming- HARD WORK.

 Big Bang of Strain–

1. 1. Brandish Creativity and Ingenuity against Pain and adversity.
   2. Squeeze the milk of time to the maximum. Push your limits.
   3. Happiness is not the goal, it is the foundation. Greatness is the goal.
   4. Seek not work-life balance, but work-life integration
   5. Think beyond the insides and outsides of the box. Build a new box.