Life Lessons

Ah life! The single thing that is more or less a great leveller which puts everyone [almost] back to their places of nature. Come rich, or poor, brilliant or inept, everyone has to pass through some form of it.

So, one of the things that I find myself liking to do a lot will be to observe other people, and no, not in a creepy stalkerish way, but really to just look at people and try to figure out what makes them tick. It is an interesting past time, really, and sometimes, there can be rather useful life lessons that can be learnt.

I talked about this before on some of the conversations that I had with some of the cab drivers that I interacted with, but this time, I guess that I'm learning new stuff from a different sort of people—those who are actually younger than me.

Yes, you didn't hear that one wrong. I actually do learn from those who are younger than me. I feel no shame in that, really, just a mild amount of indignation with the fact that I'm the older yet I'm not necessarily the smarter; I guess having lagged behind by 2 years or so for national service kind of put me in that situation anyway.

Now, when I say that I'm learning from folks who are younger than me, I'm not really referring to my TAs and such even though many of my TAs are actually younger than me in age but more senior than me by academic year. I'm actually referring to life lessons.

Stories from people are always interesting and useful. The good ones can bring us a measure of joy and happiness at times, while the very best ones let us relive vicariously in vivid detail what others have gone through. From my peers, I learnt of many things that I don't think that I have a full grasp of, like single parenthood issues, various bio-chemical related materials, and even some aspects of my pet fields that even I wasn't quite sure about. I know that I'm not that intelligent, but I'm pretty sure that I carry around a fair amount of wisdom in my head, simply through all these discourses with folks.

I like talking with people. This might come as a surprise considering the fact that I'm a self-proclaimed geek/nerd/socially inept person. But the truth is, I like talking to people, only if I can maintain my anonymity. I believe that with true anonymity, folks are more forthcoming with their stories—there's no vested interest involved because you don't even know the name of the person whom you were talking to. Random elevator conversations, equally random cluster talk and other more random on-the-public-street talk provide all the interesting anecdotes that I slowly gather and learn from them.

But you might wonder why I'm doing this. Let's face it. We only live one life; I know that some of the more hardcore folks who believe in afterlife and reincarnation and stuff like that would be happy to contradict me at this point, but in all seriousness, this is the one life that we are going to live. We can only do so many things in so little amount of time; it is neigh impossible to actually do all the things that can be done by a human given the limited time that we have to live.

That's where stories come in. Stories, anecdotes and snippets are little peepholes that other folks have kindly shared with us, to give us an insight into what they were doing, to provide us with yet another perspective without having to live all the years that the person had. Stories can be thought of as distilled wisdom—the gist of the lessons to be learnt are still there, but the time required to learn them all is much reduced. Think for a second how science and mathematics and other human knowledge have progressed over the last 400 years. None of the scientists of today lived through all those 400 years, yet all of them have a good mastery of all the concepts that were developed through those times. How was this done?

Some say that the old get decripit and should be discarded, others claim that the young are impetuous and should be ignored till they gain maturity. But who are we to point at others and label them thus so? Each one of us has lived a life that is unique to the rest of the world; each of us have many stories to tell that might teach a lesson or two to someone else who has never had the chance to go that far.

My life then is one huge story tapestry, carefully woven with blood, tears and sometimes joy. I know that deep within myself, I'm probably not one of the smartest folks on the planet, but I guess that if I live this life well enough and write enough of my stories down somewhere somehow, someone out there sometime later might find something useful to learn from, and perhaps gain that tiny sliver of experience and wisdom to be able to make his/her mark in the world.

In the information age where the latest news spread faster across the globe than pandemics, the collection of stories have grown by an exponential amount. I do my best in my little corner of the universe and contribute my little stories, in the hope that on the day that I expire, I can confidently tell myself that I had indeed, lived my life well.