Power of Unknown

Last weekend, Ryan, my son, came up with a suggestion for a game we never played before. It was quite a simple one in fact. All what we had to do, was to recollect names of movies we know. There were no rules other than limiting the movies to a specific industry, for example, South Indian movies only. Since it was a random recollection of movie names, I thought it was going to be quite simple. But as soon as the game started, realization dawned on me that it wasn’t that easy.

As the game progressed, even the names of some of the greatest movies I had watched somehow eluded me. It was quite a strain on my brain to dig deeper and recollect some of the well-known movie names from the past. Not that, the more recent ones were easy to remember. They were equally challenging. Nevertheless, we kept playing and had a good time.

Next day, Mia, my daughter came up with an improvement to this game. She suggested playing the same game, but instead of movie names, it was to be characters from movies and TV shows. My first reaction was that it was going to be a boring game. What was the point in stating character names randomly? I was certain that we would be playing only for a few minutes, and would switch back to the original version of the game shortly.

The game began. One by one, the character names started coming out. That was when the magical moment struck! Each of the characters identified not only became a part of our game, but literally started doing a parade in our minds. We were living through the movie scenes with the characters and many times were overwhelmed with emotional outbursts.

We laughed our hearts out recollecting some of the comedy scenes played by the characters. Happiness gave way to fear when characters from horror movies took centre stage. Excitement, amusement, gratitude, pride, anticipation, what not?! It was an avalanche of emotions that took us through an awesome journey as the game progressed. Little did I anticipate a seemingly simple game providing us with truckloads of entertainment. Both the games were a huge hit in our family!

A quick thought flashed my mind. Isn’t this exactly what happens in our workspace? Sometimes we are offered a new piece of work. Without any hesitation, sometimes we assume that the work is not going to be interesting. More than once, I had personally experienced, how exciting the new work was after a few days of committing to it.

Being unprejudiced is not an easy human nature. While it is quite a challenge to overcome this trait, the least we could do is to try and give a chance to the unknown. Who knows, we may be pleasantly surprised by the power of emotions that gets kicked in with the unknown. You may even end up thinking, why you didn’t do this much earlier.

So next time, we get presented with an opportunity, let us embrace the power of unknown and surrender ourselves to the mystery and tell inertia to take a hike!

I strongly recommend exploring the above, both in your family and at the work place. If you find it amusing and want to thank my kids, do let me know. Rest assured, I shall pass on the compliments to Ryan & Mia.