Life is a Race - The perfect Oxymoron

Life is a Race – the Perfect Oxymoron

Traveling backward through many years…..when I was doing my internship @ SIEMENS, Nashik they had this short poem written n bold letters and hung it in the shop floor so that everyone could see it irrespective of where they are placed in the huge area…….an here it goes……….

Everyday in Africa a gazelle wakes up and knows he must run faster than the fastest lion or be eaten

Everyday in Africa a lion wakes up and knows he must run faster than the slowest gazelle or starve

It doesn't matter whether you are the lion or the gazelle

When the sun comes up YOU BETTER BE RUNNING....

I used to cross the place at least 15 times a day and have wondered how such contradictory statements could be imposed on people….Is it because that we work for them that they assume that our thoughts could be maneuvered? Of course all this is done under the cover of improving the productivity of employees…no one is bothered or trained by the management not to bother about the aftermath…..brushing aside trivialities, let us ponder on what the actual oxymoron is. The statement talks about an African lion and a gazelle and sounds like an epilogue to a fairy tale. However, the inner meaning obviously is the bigger picture of life. My question is “Is life really a race to be won or a beauty to be experienced?” I am able to see many faces light up in curiosity as I am sure that almost all of us would have had this predicament sometime or the other in our lives and we had forcefully pushed this persistent thought to the backseat for the sake of say acads or career or the so-called so-branded success in life. One thing so peculiar is that though we are convinced that this is the most important question related to our existence as a human being, we somehow succeed in evading and live through so many years and finally lament one day on our deathbed…..”I wish my life was fun…..I wish I had trekked the Himalayas once…I wished I had danced once with my husband….”the list is endless…….
As R Madhavan says with a lot of pain in the movie 3 idiots, “right from the sperm which reached the ovum, everything in life is competition”. We cannot forget the director of ICE making this statement “Life is a Race. No one talks about the man who came second……” Much has already been voiced by Aamir in his movies “3 idiots” and “Tare Zameen Par” on nurturing your passion and how engineering colleges produce well-trained circus animals instead of human beings with individual interests and passions. Though the end shows a very rosy picture of all the three friends settling down in their own chosen fields and also becoming equally successful in that, how much of it is really true in our real lives? More importantly, how many of us are really able to single out our life’s passion before we land up in the wrong job? Are we even not that prudent enough to understand our inner self and say with courage and certainty,” This is what I want in life” and also stick to it?
Even if parents are ok with this passions stuff, we are running behind success in every facet of our life….we expect success in every damn thing that we do from dawn to dusk….and the excuse that we easily give is that the society demands us to perform……..in acads, sports and even hobbies ! ! ! [I was thinking a hobby is something that you do for pure joy….] I pity the guys who stay late in office following the “don leave before your boss” theory hoping to get some extra peanuts this year during appraisal……people who are hooked to their office and don’t understand that they have a family waiting for them……. When are they gonna wake-up and realize that life is too short to waste time in just accumulating money or running madly behind something illusionary??? Yes. I do feel that success is an illusionary feeling……it is a very abstract term which in no way is related to our happiness but grossly misunderstood as the measure of happiness. It is largely assumed by everyone that anyone who is successful is happy or rather should be happy.
I remember the character Rhyss Williams in Sheldon’s “Bloodline” who was from a poor background and wanted to be a millionaire one day. Every morning, he used to stand before the mirror, compare himself with the ideal self what he wanted to become and measure his success. Now how many of us are even ready to try this exercise? Hardly any hand would go up. This is because we are not aware of the ideal “me” that we would want us to become. We have long lost touch with our own selves and engrossed in a maddening race where no one can be the winner at the end. We only end up in a psychiatrist’s clinic with little realization that we ourselves are responsible for the mess….Now I am not trying to lecture on goal-setting but just upset with many of us who are sleeping oblivious to the beauty around us. When are we gonna wake-up? Or are we pretending to sleep?
I am not against anyone who loves his/her job or excels in acads. I just want to share my concern that we need to enjoy the journey of life and life is not only about achieving success…..life is a beautiful experience that we undergo and any moment cannot be re-lived. Can we be a bit more sensible and understand when we need to really press the pause button and continue? Life is no marathon race to be won... come on friends….let us experience life as it should be…….I would like to wrap up with a wonderful poem “THE LIESURE” which many of us would have memorized in our primary classes without dwelling on the real meaning…..let us read it now and try to understand the beauty around us...

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
William Henry Davies