my purple rain

When I was growing up, I had to face an annoying member of my family. And the member being an elder one bullied me to no end. Then, I use to think that let me grow up fast, and then I will show this person what I am! I then believed that once I grew up I’ll be independent in my life and then no one will have any say in my life. I did grow up and became fairly independent at a very early stage, both financially and emotionally, and had a good fortune not to see that person anymore. Well, being a family member we still have contacts but the person was out of my life long back once I stepped out of my house. But did it mean I did not have anyone else subsequently in my personal or professional life who was not a trouble monger to me? Or to state the broader perspective, did my problems seize to exist?

You are all aware of the answer! The ‘problems’ never seizes to occur. Rather they continuously appear in your life, time and again. The intelligent is the one who accepts this fact and makes his or her lifestyle such that it has ample room to accommodate the problems. The problems then don’t scare the intelligent because he or she knows that the only way to tackle them is to take them head-on and not by escaping or trying to avoid them. With this mindset, you attack the problems rather than getting defensive about it. And when you attack the problems head-on, you are actually engaging your-self in finding the solutions to your problems.

My experience in life has taught me one thing; a problem is as big or as small as you want to see it. And an example to that statement would be of a soldier who has lost a vital organ in the battle field but still has a smile on his face and continues with his life dealing with all problems still managing a smile on his face and with pride in his heart. At the same time, you will find many people in your day to day life, despite having the required materialistic possessions to sustain a good life and reasonably sound physical health, still complaining and cribbing day-in and day-out about the pettiest of issues! Really funny! No?…No, the real irony.

My simple suggestion to tackle a problem is to find the root cause of it. When you find the root cause, you will be in a better position to make a judgement about it. To give perspective to this rational, I would like to quote an example from the usage of technology. When we deal with systems and applications, there are occasions when we find errors showing up while using the system or the application e.g. when you check your bank statement every month, you find that your total balance does not tally as per your calculations. You do a deep dive and provide all the details to the bank staff. The bank representative looks into the matter and finds that all papers and documents are proper and in place. He further forwards the query to his technical staff for resolution of the issue. The technical guy after doing a thorough check finds that one particular investment account is not linked to your master account and hence there was a discrepancy. So, here the root cause was the linkage of a secondary account to the primary account was not in place.

Similarly, in life too we have issues interlinked with people and things. Only we need to untangle one wire at a time to reach to the main cause. See, if you can fix that. If not, continue to live with it making arrangements in your life so to have a bare minimum impact on your well-being and mental peace.

Some interesting quotes about problems:

“Never tell about your problems to others…20% don’t care about them and the rest 80% would be glad that you have them!”

“If you decorate your problem, you may not want to get rid of it.”

“When you only focus on problems, you will have more problems. When you focus on solutions and possibilities, you will have more opportunities.”

Be Happy!

Cheers!