Articles tagged with responsibility
The first thing to learn therefore is to listen to some hard talk without flinching. In the ring, the one who wins is not the one who can hit hardest but the one who can take a hard hit and remain standing. That is life. The race doesn’t end when you fall but when you fail to get up. Resilience is to get up after every fall.
From Nawab Nazir Yar Jung, I learnt the importance of commitment to quality. He never once used the word, but he never accepted anything but the best. Be it in breeding dogs or in their training, or in training horses. Attention to detail and insisting on the best. He was an expert in Judo and that also added to the quality of what he taught us. He taught us many self-defense techniques using our bare hands or ordinary objects of everyday use that are always at hand and can be converted into weapons to defend yourself and make the attacker think twice about attacking you. Martial arts training is more about training the mind than about the body. Martial arts is about living with awareness, studying your opponent, discovering his weakness, and exploiting it to your advantage. It is also about building your opponent a bridge of gold to retreat over – as Sun-Tzu calls it. But to do that you have to conquer your ego before conquering your enemy. The worst enemy is an overindulged ego.
Lying in the hammock waiting for sleep to come, I would listen to the sounds of the forest and try to identify each one. The Amazonian rainforest is a rather silent place in the night, unlike Indian forests. The animals are less vocal and the forest itself muffles sound thanks to its density – you don’t hear much except insects. If you are near the river there are not many mosquitos but you do get vampire bats and so you need to cover up unless you wish to be bitten by one of them. That doesn’t turn you into a vampire or anything so romantic, but the wound can bleed for a long time as there is heparin in the bat’s saliva which prevents blood from clotting. In addition, I am sure vampire bites are not exactly what any doctor would order so it is better to stay off their menu.
We did not see or chose not to see the real agenda – social engineering. Changing the standards of society. Changing what is acceptable and what is not. Changing what is considered taboo and what is not. Moving something from ‘unthinkable’ to ‘aspirational’. You did not think it could be done, did you? Well, just look at the way advertising and films have changed over the last 3 decades and you will see how things that our parent’s generation would have had a heart attack seeing, don’t even attract a comment from us.
The big challenge we have today is to teach our children these lessons and help them to connect to the earth, to its inhabitants and to each other. We are living beings, not binary code. The earth is not at our mercy but waits and watches to see what we do. Then it will do what it has done in the past, to protect what is beneficial and to heal itself by ridding itself of that which is harmful. Our call to define ourselves.
The biggest challenge of parenting is to accept that we are facing a world that is very different from the one we grew up in. This is true irrespective of which country you live in with the additional complexity of a rapid destruction of walls between cultures. The truth is that your solutions don’t work […]
Living Thoughtfully is not only about being goal focused but also about being aware and concerned about the effect of our actions. Of being conscious about the fact that while we need to accomplish our goals, we need to find ways of doing that without damaging, harming or oppressing others. Our problems today with global issues, be those related to wars, global warming, rapacious grasping of resources by those who have the power to do so and consequently more expenditure on military and weapons than on health, education and eradication of poverty; all relate to living thoughtlessly. Living as if the consequences of our actions will not come home to roost on our own rafters. Just as they say, ‘When a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, a tsunami is born in Indonesia’, whether we live thoughtfully or thoughtlessly, it has a profound, powerful and visible effect in all aspects of our lives. It is not possible to pollute the water of the lake we swim in without that pollution affecting us. That is the reason I believe that the most important thing for us to do and to teach our children to do, is to Live Thoughtfully.