Balancing the seesaw

I have always been on the heavier side as a kid and even today as an adult. Studying in Don Bosco as a kid, I would always enjoy the fact that the park in school had some great rides - the merry go round, the slides and even the seesaw. In our first and second standard, when the park facilities were made available to us, one of my favorite rides at the park was the seesaw. However the sad part is, since I had a distinct advantage with my weight, very few chose to be on the other side of the seesaw. As I grew up, I realized, the real fun in the seesaw game is when two people of similar sizes meet and there is a distinct willingness from both sides to give the other person a chance to go down and then willing to exert oneself again to let the other person go up. There are two important lessons I learnt - once in a while you need to let go and the second and more important one being - balance is critical in our lives.

I was driving from the Hyderabad Financial District to the airport and on the way I noticed rapid signs of development since I had last driven on that road. On asking my cab driver, he said, these were farmlands that are now taken to build huge multi-storeyed apartments. Suddenly it occurred to me - what happens if one day all farmers decide to do this? Especially around places where the real estate prices are starting to boom, selling your land off to get a lump sum amount of money that would not just relieve you off all the hard work that you put everyday in the fields to grow crops and instead have a huge amount of money that turns you into millionaires overnight, the choice seems obvious. With more and more villages turnings into towns and the towns turning into cities, this situation is not far from the horizon. Today being a farmer in India in most cases is not just hard work but most farmers still are struggling with poverty despite their efforts and there's too much left to fate. What if they all decide to become IT professionals one day ? Or any other profession for that matter? I know for sure we cannot eat software yet!

We never value what we have plenty of. Take oxygen for instance - it is taken for granted. Trees give it to us for free. We take them for granted too. No wonder this contributes to the gradual climate change. The thing with slow change is - we never quite understand when the balance tends to shift until one day we reach a situation when we can no longer handle that change.This is true for everything - a client with whom we have had a long standing relationship, an employee who has spent a considerable amount of time in an organization, our relationships with our loved ones to name only a few. On one end, every individual wants to achieve more and create more wealth for themselves and yet there is a tipping point where if the scales tilt beyond that , there's carnage! What's interesting is - till the time you are in the system, you will never quite know for sure what the tipping point is. Mother earth like any true mother is very enduring however every spring that is ever pushed, recoils. The question is how hard!

History has been witness to several instances of 'recoils' by humans when they have had their backs against the walls. We are all walking on a path full of springs - some we see and recognise, and some we don't. Let's ask ourselves, which are these springs that we tread on every day? The seesaw is a fun place to be in only if every time one tries to go down , the other makes an attempt to go up and they do it in turns. If this doesn't happen, the game ends!