2020- A lesson for a lifetime !

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward”- Martin Luther King

Last night over dinner, I was having a conversation with mom, regarding ways to clear out the ants in our house, they had become an absolute nightmare. Ants are a very irritating creature. They would crawl across every part of the room, climbing onto walls, and tables and chairs and move in unison. I had spent hours moving around the house figuring out their origin and destination as they moved in an unbreakable line.

An interesting aspect in this story was that the ants were able to carry food weighing much more than their own weight over long distances. Head down, they kept moving without any excuses. I didn’t realize that my attempt to clear them out was fast turning into a treasure hunt. The path seemed endless, entering a small hole from one end and returning from the other. After about an hour or so, I gave up.

The ants are a closely-knit family with pre-defined roles for all the family members. Queen ants lay eggs and populate the colony, male drones assist in mating with the queen and the worker ants, most of whom are females, work to bring food, build the nest and protect the colony from other ants. These worker ants are tireless creatures, who go about their job seamlessly every day with almost unconceivable grit and determination. Twenty-seven years into my life, I have come to realize and learn from these ants, how important these two qualities are to achieve constant success and happiness in our lives. Rome was not built in a day, nor was the toilet paper.

Funny though, I didn’t have to go on an ant search to look for grit and determination, because it was just a phone call away! My dearest friend Jaee completed a challenge of walking 2,020 kilometers this year. Now you might think that this isn’t a big deal. It is just around 5 kilometers each day. Let me put this into perspective. Walking 5 km is equivalent to walking for an hour each day, which is equivalent to taking close to 6500 steps each day. Now managing to do this along with prevailing health conditions makes the challenge much more difficult. The most important achievement is the ability to keep doing it every day. The ability to wake up every day, look in the mirror and tell yourself to never give up. Its an achievement, however small, of irrepressible consistency. Consistency helps in inculcating habits, which are building blocks of success.

Standing somewhere along the east coast of India in Gujarat, if you are asked to run towards Kolkata to win a race, most of you wouldn’t care to begin a loosing cause. Some would try and give up somewhere along the way. But there are some, who would just look at the horizon and wonder where Kolkata would be! And since they cannot see it, they would just aim for the next best coffee shop and keep running. That’s who my buddy Jaee is. Gujarat to Kolkata my dear friends, is close to 2000 km ! She reaffirms my firm belief in the idea that you need to dream big, but your actions need to be small and consistent. In the words of Confucius,

‘The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones’