Looking Forward
Shernaz Wadia (India, 11/01/08)
“I am so looking forward to February. It’ll be so much fun. We’ll all be together again.”
“Well. You are lucky you can look forward to it. I...”
“You are just being prudent. If it doesn’t work out as planned you don’t want to be disappointed.”
“That’s a plateau. That’s boring.”
Loud guffaws at the other end.
“I guess that’s what experience does if you are not careful with it. Makes you bored and boring.”
This telephonic conversation set me thinking. Doesn’t that happen to most of us, as we grow older? We reach a certain plateau and stay put there because somewhere in the process of experiencing life, we lose enthusiasm. It is not experience, but what we do with it, how we selectively allow only disappointments to guide and fashion our future that makes us stagnate. We allow them to override all else. Sometimes a well planned outing or holiday fizzles, something we are looking forward to, does not materialize. There are impediments to realizing a dream and we fall flat on our face. Let it happen more than once and we tell ourselves ‘Never plan ahead again. Never get too excited. Never see big dreams...’ Never again becomes the catchphrase of our lives, zeroing in on and guzzling our fervor. We are bound to be thwarted at times. But didn’t other trips excel our expectation? There were those times when all went as designed and nothing marred our anticipation. Life took positive strides in the direction of our goals.
Yet we stop looking forward. Even our backward glances affirm only regrets setting us surely on the way to despair. Strangely, we liken experience with what life did not give when we expected it! And we allow that lop-sided equation to order our future! Experience is a teacher. There is no refuting that. But ‘good’, reassuring and letting us bound along life’s path with delight, or ‘bad’, holding us back and dampening our spirits at every bend, depends on our mindset. We can repel people or draw them into our circle of inspired living by how we relate to our experiences. If our experience constantly says, “This can’t be done.” “That will not happen.” “It is bound to go wrong”...only negative signals, we can count on spending most of our days alone in a rocking chair, constantly moving but going nowhere.
If we negate the child in us, always acting our ‘age’ and consulting past letdowns to guide the days yet to come, we deserve the ho-hum dullness of old age. Or we can spruce up life with wonder and awe, expectation and acceptance, honoring our inner child. We can be grumpy, crabby and perennially deterred or smiling and exuberant, ready to hop up and start afresh with the tenacity of a toddler learning to walk. As in everything else, the perspective is ours to choose. We can be like any one of the three stone masons who were building a temple. Faced with the question, “What are you doing?” one said he was earning a living. The second one said he was chipping marble blocks, while the third one replied spiritedly, “I am building the house of God.” We must determine whether we are going to plod skeptically through life or revel in its varied aspects.
It is said that of all the tools in the devil’s armoury, discouragement is the most prized and unsparingly used. It is the crowbar with which he can enter a person’s soul, the one with which he broke Judas Iscariot and continues to batter discontented, demoralized people with. When life begins to dishearten, when setbacks threaten to entrench us in a rut, when obstacles grind us to a halt it is time to tell the devil, “I am going to face the future with élan. All your exertion will not make me a despairing pessimist. I will live zestfully, with joy and hope.”
Satan too must bow before such verve! So let us look forward to living with childlike eagerness and youthful vitality. May our inner child triumph!
