The Bottom Rung
May 8, 2020: A very special day. I’d turned in my final assignment in the wee hours of the morning and managed to catch a few hours of sleep amid the churn of anticipation leading up to my crowning moment. The celebratory fervor in the auditorium was palpable; excited murmurs were audible, as proud family members from all over the world waited for their freshly minted MBA graduate to walk the stage. I adjusted my cap and straightened my robe for the umpteenth time. I felt a surge of adrenaline as my name was called and I walked onto the stage – confident, proud, and very conscious of all eyes on me. I beamed, skimming the crowd in a futile attempt to locate my parents. I waved at my professors, grateful. The resounding claps reached their peak, everyone sharing in my moment of glory, before fading into the distance as I exited the stage…
“Nisha Suresh Advani”
My laptop screen welcomed me back from my subliminal trip. My photograph and name on a slide marked the culmination of my two-year journey as a student of management. I couldn’t tell which was more bizarre – a graduation on Zoom, or the one I’d just cooked up. My roommate and I cheered in our living room. Congratulatory texts from family and friends, who were watching the broadcast from miles away, poured in. I sank back into the couch, a cocktail of emotions spiraling through my system. The anticlimax of a virtual graduation wasn’t lost on me. My sense of accomplishment came with expectations of myself; and close at heel came the nervousness of living up to those expectations. Almost in a flash, my exhilaration was tempered by the gaping uncertainty of my future - a future in a world that had turned upside down, just like the metaphorical ladder I found myself standing on. I felt like I was jumping off a cliff without a parachute…
Someday in June 2020: The NBER officially declares that the United States has been in a recession since February. Record highs and lows have now become common vocabulary in our news feeds. The economy is a ship out on a stormy sea while politics has hijacked much of common sense! And, the world’s problems have manifested into our own.
I imagine everyone who is reading this is going through some version of their own struggle, personal, professional, or perhaps both. No one is shielded from the wrath of the pandemic. Amidst the rampant insecurity and despair that I see everywhere, I look inwards. My life is no different. I graduated with my MBA, headlong into turmoil, unemployed. Mine is a tangible struggle too. And it compounds itself daily, through a concoction of unfolding circumstances and the assortment of internal responses they elicit.
You see, I’ve always been an achiever. For the most part. Model student, loving daughter, dedicated employee, caring friend, ambitious woman. I’ve overcome every obstacle, risen to every challenge and lived to tell the tale. I know that this period too, after it has passed, will join my repertoire of defining experiences – regardless of outcome. But for now, I think I must pause and take in the struggle, appreciate the pain while I can feel it, before it’s all over. No, I’m not a glutton for punishment, if that’s what you’re thinking. I firmly believe that every emotion, negative, positive, or somewhere in between, has its rightful place in shaping how we perceive a situation. And therefore, I wonder, should carpe diem be valid only for the good times?
Social media, movies, books, podcasts are filled with stories of perseverance. Well-meaning individuals share their anecdotes in the hope that a forlorn being somewhere will take heart again. I too derive inspiration from these little nuggets of wisdom that come my way. This too shall pass. But, do we need to wait for it to have passed before we earn the right to share our story?
We live in a society where failure, however you choose to define it, is still by and large considered shameful. You may argue that people talk about their tribulations openly, however I counter – only in retrospect. We wear our battle scars proudly after the war is over, yet most of us would rather muffle our screams while we’re bleeding in the trenches. Doesn’t this behavior defeat the very purpose of being authentic? It’s easy to gloss over your drudgery from a pedestal, once you know the outcome. Uncertainty is scary for most of us. The clamor of voices from the upper echelons is fraught with advice for those flailing below. Those that managed to climb the ladder are eager to share what worked for them; those on the lower rungs ruefully swallow what didn’t. The bottom of the pit is usually a dark, silent place. The battle there is, more often than not, fought in isolation or with the support of a select few confidantes. Rarely do we see someone openly talk about the barrage they are facing while they are in the midst of it. Authenticity comes from being open to vulnerability. Ironically, being vulnerable requires self-assurance. And, sometimes that’s exactly what’s shaken up.
Perhaps this curse of hindsight is born out of our conditioning to be driven by outcome. We are taught to set goals before we set out to do anything. Because setting a goal gives us something to strive for, to move us consciously in the direction of our self-defined success. I too have set many a goal and have failed. Many, many times. In fact, I feel like I am failing right now. Every day. The solid plans I had are now crumbling away, pressing me to improvise. The mounting stress is unleashing its menace on my health. I feel I have rapidly aged in the last few months alone. I will not deny that there are moments and days when I feel like giving up; packing my bags and taking the next flight home. However, while that is currently infeasible given the situation, it also obliterates the experience that was designed to be mine.
Although I may feel like I am failing, I have never thought of myself as a failure. It would be very easy at this point to wallow in self-pity. I am after all, a victim of circumstance, like millions around the world. I am hanging out on the bottom rung, and it’s okay. I’m okay. Because I see, live and breathe the beauty of my struggle. While I’m in it. For most of us, the journey doesn’t exist until we have reached a semblance of a destination, whether it’s the one we set out for, or one that we happened to arrive at. My effort is to change that. While mine is not a heroic tale of victory, I’m sharing the story without knowing how it ends in the hope that you too find some solace in your struggle. Whatever you’re struggling with, don’t just acknowledge it. Own it. It’s yours for a very strong reason. Problems aren’t exactly fun. But resilience is built on the foundation of setback. As you wait for it to pass, take a moment to pause and to soak it all in. I look forward to meeting you at the end of your struggle, and mine.
Our worlds are to a great extent, what we make them, but never entirely. A sense of worldbuilding begins from the fact that although humans do not fully make the worlds in which they are, they can and do make intentional and creative interventions in the attempt to remake distorted worlds into newly imagined creations.
ReplyDeleteAlbeit such thoughts sound powerful, but questions still remain. How do we build a newly fashioned world and what can it be like? For example, if we imagine a world built on human rights, the utopian world of the a priori, is one of reproductive totality and thus is then a “closed,” world. Then how might a world that is characterized by attunement and projects “openness,” come about? How might we need to conceive of and understand such a world and the relations arising out of those unobliging modalities that seem to annihilate our preconceived world?
The argumentative point is that while each of us participates in the unfolding of specific unobliging modalities of the unfamiliar and mostly disorienting worlds, a process that always exceeds our capacity to know it, control it, and in most cases even be aware of it.
Nevertheless, as history has proven, we humans override these disconcerting situations because we are known to foil those "evil" forces by imagining new worlds and not only creating them but also maintaining them. Our existence has a symbiotic relationship with human endeavor.
Let us not forget though that the concept of new worlding is never entirely a human endeavor, as nonhumans and natural forces also play an integral role in these processes. In this context, a tsunami may destroy homes, an asteroid may be more destructive than any nonnuclear warfare, global warming may pose a hazard to our preconceived notions of the natural world, a debilitating virus may be as virulent as nuclear weapons of mass-destruction, but until these things happen—humans continue to endeavor and to create a stock-pile of new innovations and preferably in ways that increasingly diminish the devastating likelihood and impact of nonhuman actors and their threats of potential destruction.
At such significant junctures, while each of us participates in the unfolding of these seemingly apocalyptic events filled with strange and beyond human imagination potentialities, which in most cases exceed our capacity to know, control, and even understand their destructive possibilities-- however, instead of falling prey, we continue to create new worlds and attune them to our future goals and by extension, humanitarian goals.
In this context, humans reign supreme as we have productive and in-built regenerative mechanisms that characterize us as creators of significant worlds and maintainers of it.
Afterall, the reality of the human “mind,” albeit an abstract, intangible concept like “love,” is still the highest and most powerful form of thinking on planet earth that makes us different from non-human forces, no matter the kind of threat they pose to mankind!
We humans have an active, thinking mind, something that is lacking in those untamed forces of nature! Here, Milton’s lines from “Paradise Lost” come to mind: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.”
In the current status quo, as if by a deal with Milton’s Satan, we have found ourselves in a critical worldly event which denotes widespread thwarting of not only our pre conceptualized aspirations; but also concerns a situation that reminds us that we are not alone, that we belong to a global community. And for our existence to be in continuum, we must first and foremost exercise the exclusive powers of our MIND by acting as responsible individuals and believe in our potential to exercise our choice and “make a Heav'n of Hell.”
Sending you my best wishes for continued good happenings in your newly attuned world.
Nisha, you are a woman of substance, keep on going!