Do You Know Your Worst Opponent?

While we are on the topic of overcoming challenges, it would be logical to give a thought to the origin of all these challenges. Not all of us are celebrity cricketers gearing up to face a stadium full of audience and a vicious bowler, like Virat Kohli does in the Cinthol commercial. Most of us don’t have grand challenges like that which exhilarate us enough to scream “Alive is Awesome!”. The majority of us are average people, with average lives and our battles are as small as our lives. For a housewife in a small town, a challenge would be to convince her in-laws to let her work, whereas for her urban counterpart the challenge would be to handle her infant baby while still managing to get that promotion she has been eyeing.

If you get into the depth of it, you will see that a “challenge” is hardly anything tangible, unless it is a maths exam of course! Challenge is in fact just a plain normal situation, to which you give some significance and whose consequences will matter to you. So if this situation is not the challenge, then what is?

You need not go far. The only thing you ever do challenge is yourself. You are your only best friend, and you are your own worst opponent. You will never achieve anything if you fail to move yourself towards getting there. Situations are same for everyone, its the effort they demand from you that gives them the magnitude. Again the focus comes back on you. You challenge yourself to perform better, to change your ways, to muster up the courage to do something crazy. It’s always you.

Challenges come when you become comfortable and settle into one thing. When the tide of change comes, it will be your inertia to change that will slow you down and increase the struggle of movement. When you want to change your life for good, it is this inertia that will stop you and you will have to challenge yourself to up and get a better life for yourself. If you give in and stop moving, you will become like a rock at the bottom of the ocean.

So challenge yourself. Challenge your fears and overcome them. Challenge your limits and reach for excellence. Challenge your insecurity and explore all that life offers you. Challenge your courage and take risks once in a while. There is nothing called an easy life. That which is easy, is not life. Life is climbing the sea side cliff only to jump off it from the peak, right into the bliss of flight. Talk to that one person you always were too nervous to approach. See where it goes. Challenge your scared, conventional and narrow-minded self, and open yourself to limitless living. Challenges are the reason to live, because it just goes to show that there is always a new frontier to chase. Life has a meaning, and it is to find the scale of it. How far can you go? 

(URLs lead to Cinthol's Alive is Awesome campaign. Story courtesy: SS)

Swimming Upstream

Everyone gets bitten by the self-discovery, self-realization bug once in a while. The last bout that I had left me with a very strong thought, which I don’t really believe is entirely an original of mine because it has been said over and over again since the stone ages.

Meek is the existence of those who float with the flow. The mighty ones challenge the tides.

If you come to think of it, the word “challenge” can be a very relative concept. Different things become challenges for different people. Some love talking, some are painfully shy. Maths comes easily to some, and for some it’s a slow bleeding death. It’s also a national and cultural thing. For instance, in an individualistic society like the US, you are free to practice your own choice and challenges come in the shape of fate and chance. Here in India, whereas, asserting yourself is a challenge in itself. I think it sucks, but that’s the way it is.

The entire society is built on such deep rooted foundations of socially-interdependent systems that it is scary for a person to even think of being entirely on his own. To think of breaking away from the line and setup one’s own shop and sing one’s own song. Imagine a typical Indian life timeline. You are born in a traditional, religious family. You are raised to be an obedient person who is an advocate of his culture and blindly follows all he is told to do by elders. Blindfolded, you go through the motions. School, engineering/medical college, job, marriage, kids, retirement, death.  It’s THE life plan. If even one step goes wrong, people go into panic mode. It’s so automatic that nobody realizes that the life they are living isn’t there’s.  Nobody realizes death was never the last step. They’ve been dead all along. How can this be called life?

Being alive is being in control of your own destiny. Being alive is LIVING your life, not going through the motions that have become a standard because million other did it. Being alive is giving your life the dimensions that you want to, not downsize it to fit someone else’s plan for your life. And I admit, it is lot easier said than done. It’s a daunting task.

You just have to do what you want to. What YOU think is right. 

It’s so amazingly simple that nobody has any idea how to do it. You can begin by stopping whatever you are doing right now, and just think whether what you doing is what YOU want to do. It’ll be the biggest revelation of your life and it will change everything. It will change you. You will clearly see what you want and with time, you’ll figure out how to get it. But the most difficult part comes after that. Standing up for yourself. You will face resistance everywhere. The security and reliance you have become so used to, will vanish. It will be replaced by constant transience and uncertainty, maybe like the cold turkey phase for drug addicts. But ultimately, when you have fought everyone off and found yourself, that addictive aftertaste of smashing a challenge and proving yourself. Believe me; it’s like nothing on this planet. People end up leading wild lives just to taste this feeling over and over again.

That is the taste of life. That is being alive. And being alive isawesome.

(URLs lead to Cinthol's Alive is Awesome campaign. Story courtesy: SS)