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.