27 Every day is a new test

Many of us sometimes tend to “slack off” and coast along on the aftermath of past efforts, especially after a period of extra-hard work on a particular project or assignment. Let me amend that: it’s true of most of us, much of the time.  We feel entitled to a little rest, as a reward for all the work we’ve already put in. Then we are hurt and surprised when our little self-indulgence attracts adverse attention.

One of the hard facts of life is that we are being assessed and challenged every day, every hour, and demands and expectations are always waiting on us. Thus, the periods of self-indulgence we can safely allow ourselves are few and fleeting; we need to be dressed and ready for the world at short notice. Every day is a new test of our commitment, our foresight, our competence, our imagination, and our connectedness. Everything we have achieved and contributed so far can be reduced to nothing in the reckoning, if we are found wanting in the day’s challenge, in the need of the hour.

This fairly unforgiving nature of the world is the reason why months or years of plodding along do not justify a single bout of bad behavior. We will be judged by those rare, occasional outbursts and tantrums, not by our normal behavior and deportment the remaining 99% of the time. What people will remember us by, are those isolated incidents when we attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Since each of us will have at least half a dozen of those incidents strung along a lifetime, that’s how we will be characterized, described and judged. That’s why crimes of passion, incidents of road rage, and such rare occurrences attract attention, outrage and opprobrium. There’s no use saying that we were perfectly good and kind citizens and family persons, until that guy cut in in front of us at the intersection, making us lose control of our emotions and smashing up something or beating up someone in our rage. Or that we were perfectly mild and good persons except the one time we broke that guy’s head… and so on.

Even in self-defense, we are only allowed to exercise a reasonable amount of force. That’s why we are never justified in opening fire on a fleeing thief, no matter how much we may have felt violated. The principle, as far as I remember, is that the maximum damage our defensive action would conceivably cause, should be in proportion to the maximum penalty the offence would attract in law. Once the thief or pocket-picker has started running away, he is not a threat any longer to our immediate life, and therefore any action of ours can also not extend to causing a threat to the thief’s life. In my department, the first case used to be registered against the forest guards who opened fire, and they would have to prove the plea of self-defense. Sometimes they would have to cool it in jail for weeks and months on a charge of manslaughter, and we would be helpless in the face of the legal process. If the offence is a minor one, punishable with say a fine, then we cannot “take the law into our own hands” and mete out a much higher punishment in the form of bodily harm or assault, even in our own defense. This is a bitter pill to swallow, especially when we feel that our private lives or our basic rights to a peaceful life have been badly violated. But we are ourselves under test in such situations.

I saw a wonderful movie sometime back, about three generations of fathers and sons. I don’t remember the full plot or the actors (I think one of them was Richard Dreyfus, I will check it up), but the one thing that has stuck in my memory is the scene where Dreyfus, whose own grown but wastrel son has just run off with a new girl-friend leaving his little son behind, asks his father, “Dad, when does it stop?”. The grizzled old man, cradling the little boy (his great-grandson) on his lap, says, “Son, it doesn’t ever”. Once you are a parent, there is no quitting, it never stops. The more you feel you’ve done your bit and can now chuck the responsibilities, the more ready should you be to shoulder yet more. The inexorable law of the generations will not let you quit till death do you part.

So as we rise from our beds every morning (or at whatever time), we need to remind ourselves that the day will bring its own trials and temptations, and we need to be ready to face each of them as though it was our first. We don’t think, for instance, that all these years we never stole, and therefore if we did take a bribe today, it would be offset by all those years of virtue. No, sir, it will not; and what is more, if we are rude or dishonest or unfair just once in a blue moon, it will still be those instances that we will be remembered for, and not for the other 364 days of blameless behavior and  exemplary performance.

26 The downslide starts at… the pinnacle

When you were kids, would you take your bicycles out into the country-side and wander at will? The blue hills in the distance beckon, but as you crest hump after hump and coast down the other side, they seem ever farther away.  But those free slides down the downslopes are all the fun!

This is a metaphor which breaks down at this point, because sliding down the hill is not pleasant in real life! But have you noticed that in so many cases, the downslide starts soon after something has reached a pinnacle? Just when people heave a sigh and think they can now relax the rest of their lives playing golf or something, that’s when life has this nasty trick of pulling the rug from under their feet, and throwing them back into the pit.

I’ve noticed it often enough in technology. Look at music recordings, for instance: in the mid-1980s, LPs (vinyls) had reached some sort of peak of technical excellence, what with the digital mastering, transfer through ‘state-of-the-art’ audio equipment and tapes, and hi-fi playback models. And then quite suddenly they became out-moded. I remember one firm (I think it was Chevron) which was practically giving away the last digitally mastered LP free to anyone who cared to send the postage.  Then for a long time cassette tapes replaced the low end, while CDs took over the top. By the 2000s, tapes started fading away, CDs ruled. By this decade, even CDs have become passé. The internet and mp3 files rule the roost. A similar thing happens with computers, and computer media: look at the way floppys and micro-discs have evolved, till now we use the internet and chip-based memory sticks. At every stage, it appears that just as the technology seemed to have solved all the problems and you had a more or less perfected product, there were developments taking place in the shadows that suddenly came out and engulfed the ruling party!

Perhaps this is a character of Western technological society, with its constant drive to improve and invent, whereas the Eastern civilisations tend to keep doing the same thing over long periods of time. In administration, the old British colonial systems were so strongly ingrained into us (in India), that even today the lower functionaries still faithfully fill up the same forms and go through the same procedures. Only now, with increasing computerization, are we having to learn new ways.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a basic nature of change and development in human beings. Cultures which persist in doing the same thing over generations are seen as stagnant, unresponsive to changing environments, unmindful of fresh opportunities, and in the long run, unsuccessful. Some such thing seemed to have befallen the Neanderthals, for instance, despite their brawnier bodies and bigger brains compared with Cro-magnon (modern) man.

 It is when things are going really well, then, that the wise look around for newer and better things to do. They are not fooled or blinded by a period of success, which as we know is rarely a permanent state ascribable to our virtues alone (chance plays a huge part!). Constant paranoia and skepticism is the price for success. It is when things are going well, that the tough get going!

25 You’re not owed anything!

Many of us go through life with the sense of being cheated of our due. Especially with the post-modern post-everything self-oriented consumption-centric life mode copied from the New World, more and more people in hitherto sheltered cultures and societies are also falling prey to this syndrome. We grow old with the conviction that a lot of debts are owed us. We grow mad with frustration totting up all these amounts receivable (with compounded interest and service charges) and gnashing our teeth at how well off we would be but for these bad accounts …

We do so much for our children, but would you even have imagined the depths of their ingratitude… they don’t listen to our advice, but go off and do what they want! And when things don’t work out, they come right back… if a fairy godmother were to come this moment and give three wishes…

Really? You should be so lucky… What about the debt you owe all those generations that have brought you here? What about those ancestors who braved it through disasters and deprivations, and brought us through the eye of the needle, so to speak? When we start totting up the balance sheets, they are mightily weighed against us. We are merely returning a minute part of that accumulated balance when we do something for the next generation. There is nothing owed to us! The same thing applies to any service we render to our own parents, except that the argument is strengthened many fold because we should know better, and because we owe a direct debt of gratitude to them just like we expect our children to realize their debt to us.

When my own father was passing through his last days in the hospital, the doctor attending him observed and remarked that children who get the job of cleaning up their fathers at the end are indeed lucky, because there is no other way they can ever repay the debt of life… perhaps this is a sentiment characteristic of eastern cultures, but I think it is there in the traditions of all human societies.

 If you spot an inconsistency here, it is because the feeling of indebtedness has to be one-sided: the parents  should not expect their  children to feel in debt, but equally the children should not ignore their indebtedness to all the cohorts of their progenitors.

 That was just one example. If the same attitude of not being owed permeates  other spheres of one’s life, all the better. Does your boss owe it to you to give a leg up? Does your junior have to pick up after you and cover for you, or is it a big favor if he does? Does your spouse have to plan your entertainments and file your papers? Who owes you the daily shopping so that you can eat? Is society at fault because you get addicted? Is the television responsible for your sleep deficit? And so on.

Each one of us is occupying space and consuming resources on this planet that we have neither produced nor earned . The world, my dear Sir, and Madam, does not owe us a living.

24 Invest in a number of small things…

Here’s a ploy to beat the demons of boredom and greed:  frequent the altar of the God of Small Things!

First, let’s take boredom: it’s in the nature of human beings to take up things with great enthusiasm, but lose interest rapidly. Being a species characterized by intense curiosity and  a drive to go out and explore,  humans hanker after novelty and variety. In our humdrum lives, there’s very little of that (unless it is driving on a city’s mean streets), and even on our infrequent holidays, we are shepherded and cosseted by tour operators and hotel staff. When we are relatively young and unfettered, we can risk going out to undeveloped places without assured accommodation or return bookings, but when we have families, jobs, and taxes to pay, these things are pretty much decided beforehand, especially now that communication is instantaneous and almost universal.

What’s left is then, to explore the world of ideas and things around us. Fortunately, there’s unlimited opportunities for the first, through books, internet, and the media. The second costs money, so my suggestion is to get hooked on things which are cheap, rich in variety, and moderately difficult to get. That’s why collection of sets, whether it be of stamps (very old-fashioned!), or cinema posters (very retro chic!), or LPs (also old-world), or jazz CDs, or tea-cozies, or china figurines, or coffee mugs, or botanical specimens, and so on, is an excellent option.  Not only do they give the opportunity for search, stalking, and capture, but they also absorb hours of your spare time arranging, cleaning, cataloguing, and admiring them. And they need not cost an arm and a leg, provided you are not into collecting really costly antiques, vintage cars, or the like.

There is a link between this approach and the stability of systems. They used to say, in the 1970’s, that complex ecosystems are more stable, for instance.  The interaction of large numbers of different species, predator and prey, eater and eaten (phagal relations!), pests and victims, and a variety of specializations and adaptations to specific ecological niches, and complex symbiotic interdependencies, leads to a community that has many stabilizing mechanisms, many checks and balances. Tropical forests are like this. In contrast, we have ecosystems that have very few ecological niches, very few species, and simple interactions, which have few checks and balances, and are therefore relatively unstable. One species may expand so fast that it eats itself out of food, and then there is a population crash. The temperate forests are supposed to be like that, characterized by epidemic diseases and violent population fluctuations and cycles.

I’m not sure whether ecologists still swear by the complexity-begets-stability hypothesis nowadays, and it may just be one of those fanciful thoughts, like the end-of-history and the dawn-of-equality theories we had at the turn of the century. But where it concerns consumer behavior, it seems to be spot-on, as we all know that more and more of the same stuff bores us to tears. So my way is to get some small thing to keep the interest in life and living, alive!

There is another aspect to this type of ‘retail therapy’ for a sense of well-being. I know many people, good friends and relatives, who swear by the latest and best. They believe in going to the top of the market. Well, a choice has always to be made between costs and benefits, as the best usually costs the most. Firstly, we need to be sure that it’s really the best, and not some market hype. Secondly, we need to be sure that we really need that level of quality, or durability, or finish. Technology is changing and developing so fast, that very few consumer products remain useful or relevant more than a couple of years. Indeed, you can’t even get older things serviced or supported any more.  Sometimes the less costly choice may be more practical and useful if you take into account its useful life.

Thirdly, there is the blessed 20:80 rule again, which means that most of us do not even want to use all the options available, since we are quite satisfied by a small sub-set of them. In cameras, or computers, or cell phones, we don’t really want much beyond the basic operations; who has the time anyway! If you can’t understand how to open the case or switch on a system (it’s happened to me and a friend on top of a mountain range!), what’s the use of all the bells and whistles? What’s the use of all those gears and levers if you need to study a 200-page manual to operate it? So are we paying for the inventor’s fulfillment, or for our satisfaction? Indeed, we can even leave it to other, richer and braver, souls to forge ahead on the cutting edge of technology, and we can get by quite well on a slightly older model. Upgradation need not be done at every new release or model, and we can safely wait for two or three generations to pass by before our old model becomes useless. I’m thinking of computers, cameras, music systems, and the like.

Fourthly, there is the good old minimax principle, which dissuades us from putting too many eggs into one basket. If you put your entire savings into one big thing, like a house, it may be the last thing you will be able to do; the rest of your life may go in paying the mortgage and interest.  So prefer to divert your mind with a multitude of small things, and leave the big ones to the movers and shakers of the world!