Stones & Waves?

Stone and waves?

?

A long time ago during my teenage days, a wise old man told me a very interesting story about life and shaping the character, at one of the family get-togethers. The discussion started with a question I had raised to him regarding a situation around adversity and challenges we face in life, something our family was facing at that point of time. The discussion was primarily centered on – Why these challenges keep coming at us? What should be our reaction?

The wise man smiled and took me aside– and asked me “Have you ever been to a beach? Have you seen sea waves smash into the stones on the beach?”. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, Life is like these waves crashing continuously into these stones. The waves are the challenges we face, which keep coming at us, at work, in our personal lives, relationships and so on… And we are the Stones (apparently tough), with our huge ego and pride. While these waves keep smashing into us and try to break us and these challenges keep coming at us in one way or the other in life, we the stones, keep facing these challenges standing steady and these challenges slowly start shaping our character, our personality – by the experiences we face, with the constant learning from life. These rocks do not budge initially (when we are young, when we are na?ve) but as the character starts shaping, we let go of our ego (being more rounded and grounded) – we learn to roll with the waves, we tend to learn to live in harmony. These waves at times ebb and at times rise higher but they will keep coming at us in life and our job is to face them and learn from these challenges - let go of the ego we harbor, by rolling with the waves and living in sync.

So the wise man said – be like these stones which face adversity and use these challenges to shape your future, learn from them, let go off your ego – and you will live in harmony with the challenges in life. These challenges will help you in rounding off your character and allow you to roll with the waves. It depends on you how you perceive it and build on it. The key lessons I could gather, in hindsight, were:

1.??????Face the challenges and use the learning to build your character

2.??????Be flexible in life – roll with the life

3.??????Keep your ego in check – if you keep the ego, the challenges will anyways shatter you.

4.??????Be humble

Eventually you will learn what to let go and what to fight for – that’s the beauty of a character that these challenges help build. This is true for both personal and professional life.