Into The Wild

    You are no lone wolf.  Stop telling yourself that you are different. You might claim that words will never hurt you; you might as well claim to be living in Mars and hosting Zeus and his pantheon of Gods for tea everyday. Admit it. You crave for acceptance. Those likes on facebook and those retweets on twitter light up your face. All those times your manager truly praised your work or some colleague nominated you for a spot award, there was a tinge of pure joy and excitement flowing through your veins.

    At the end of the day, whatever way you look at it, we are all apes. We learn by imitating. If you have ever seen a child pick up language, you know what I am talking about.  If it is society that shapes us, are we just pawns hoping that one day we might reach the end and become queens and bishops? Unfortunately no; Cinderella’s dreams generally do not come true in real life and the one of the evil twin sisters always gets the prince. Sooner or later, the masks we wear to perform the pantomime that society demands of us comes back to define us and our perception about ourselves.

    What does it feel to wake up and head to work knowing that you will end up doing the same thing tomorrow, the next week and the week after, the next year and perhaps years to come until you retire to take up gardening or writing letters to newspaper editors? Have you ever woken up and told yourself that today you will tell your boss to go f**k himself, quit your job and just travel around the world until the end of days. What am I raving about? Everyone has those days…

    I just came to know about a guy who plays around a dozen sports and is very good at most, is a top notch sniper and a Beretta pistol shooter, digs wells for villages without access to clean water, builds classrooms in villages and whose dream is to visit more countries than his age. Also before I forget, he once drove an auto from Chennai to Mumbai and is currently teaching in a school in Ladakh. Talk about developing a multifaceted personality...  When I came to know about this, something inside me stirred, the wanderlust that society and I had managed to talk into submission would not remain silent anymore. It screamed out that I should go out, live a life of adventure and explore the world with the same curiosity that drove our ancestors out of Africa. Alas, the moment passes and I always wake up. Not literally because I am already wide awake, but because I am getting late for office.

    So what about my free will? Was my destiny pre-determined based on the alignment of stars and planets the moment I was born? When was the last time I did something just to prove to myself that I am not living in a Matrix-like-world? When was the last time I forgot about society, its rigid rules and firm machinations and did something for pure thrill? The question I ask myself and you is this - when was the last time you did something crazy?

Is it worth all the pain?

        A friend asked me this question when he saw me limping ostentatiously having just finished my first ultra marathon distance of 50k the previous day- “Is it worth all this pain?” “Why that question? Why not just congratulate me and get on with making a living writing code”, I thought. The answer is straightforward. We Indians are obsessed with value in any transaction or activity, be it mileage of our cars or the best value-for-money restaurant nearby. When running marathons, you spend good money and return home walking looking like a Hyderabad auto just ran over your foot; clearly poor return on investment.

        “Absolutely worth every moment of it”, I replied instinctively and without much reasoning. Stupid question I thought. Would you ever ask a woman who just spent loads of money getting the latest pedicure whether it was worth it? Of course not, though I suspect mainly for personal well being sake. I probably came off sounding as a masochist who loved suffering and pain with that answer but that is not true, at least not completely. Seeing that nothing more was forthcoming he offered me the usual platitudes like “You’re an Inspiration”, “Great performance” etc. and we both moved on. But for some reason the question, like some bad memory, rankled me for quite some time.

        A couple of weeks later, the good folks in the HR department of my company organized a talk by Mark Inglis – mountaineer, researcher, wine-maker and motivational speaker. As a rule I steer clear away from motivational speakers who never achieve much in their own lives and remain in business mainly due to their superior oratorical skills. But Inglis is a doer, so I was eager to attend his talk. He had an interesting tale for us, the story of his life.

        Mark Inglis started his life as a mountaineer and ended up having to amputate both his legs due to frost bite after being stuck in a small cave on top of Mount Cook in New Zealand due to an intense blizzard. With his chosen career path no longer a livelihood option, he returned to University to earn a degree in Biochemistry, become a wine-maker and also cycled his way to Silver medal in the Sydney 2000 Paralympics. Twenty years later, he took up mountaineering again, conquered Mount Cook and later become the first double amputee to conquer Mount Everest. Inglis had us mesmerized for more than an hour with his gritty and poignant tale.

        So when he threw the floor open for questions, there was only one question that came to my mind – “Is it worth all the pain?” “Absolutely”, he replied, “When you chase adventure, suffering is an occupational hazard”. The look of pride in his eyes said it all. I might have as well asked Alexander the Great it conquering all those lands served any purpose. I realized that some questions cannot be answered with words alone.

        Now I am going to risk sounding as didactic as one those hollow motivational speakers that I love to hate and tell you what I really think is the reason why people ask that question. Most Indians are so busy surviving and making a living they look forward to very little in life, let alone adventure or sport. So when somebody else chases that dream, it is sometimes regarded as a vain pursuit. This must  and hopefully will change once we reach a certain standard of living. And once we get there we might even learn to enjoy suffering, much like what Rafael Nadal said after losing an epic five setter to Djokovic in the Australian Open 2012 finals - "When you are fit and have passion for the game, when you are ready to compete, you are able to suffer and enjoy suffering".