The school had arranged for a talk by a child psychologist on the occasion of the annual PTA meeting. Speaking of the opinions that pre-teens (9-12 years) have about their mothers, he said that almost all of them resented the role of a ‘historian’ their mothers play. “Whenever I lose a pen, how does she remember, recall, and repeat the history of every pen I have had till date, its colour, where it was bought, how I liked/hated it, and where I lost each one of them?”
Well, mothers will be mothers. But reminiscences of a mother are also priceless. Remembering the trivia about our frailties come with the same territory that will warm your heart with narratives on those moments that made you who you are today. “My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso,” says Pablo Picasso. That is the bundle mothers are, sometimes exasperating and always right.
There may be a few skills used in managing a team that may be common with those in parenting. Yet, there is no fun with a boss who specializes in analysing past events to death. Your heart sinks when the litany of past misdemeanours by the team is a regular feature at every meeting. In a novel “The Beacon”, the author A B Shepherd describes such a character, “He took his time looking around for anything interesting to salvage, but found only broken bits of what once was.”
When your bowler has given away six runs by bowling a bad ball, you have two choices as a captain. You can go up and talk, discuss, advice, or instruct him on what the next ball should be like. That you are talking to him is a sign of your displeasure with the bad ball he bowled. As a captain, you could also do nothing and simply rely on the bowler’s self-esteem (that is already hurting) to come up with an unplayable foot-crunching yorker that will bamboozle and beat the batsman all ends up. Every professional has only one weapon to set right the wrongs of the past – The Future.
Readers’ Digest once carried an article that compared vultures to hummingbirds. As we know, vultures are ugly, lethargic and carry an unbearable stink around them. On the contrary, hummingbirds are beautiful (body with intensely coloured feathers), make a sweet noise (they can fly in reverse) and are very active (exceptionally small birds with the greatest comparative energy output of any warm-blooded animal). The article gives an interesting reason behind such contrasting qualities of these two birds – their diet.
The vulture feeds on the dead (past, long gone), while the hummingbird feeds on seeds and nectar – the essential ingredients of the future. This simple reason accounts for the huge differences in looks, lifestyle and attitudes between the two birds. Jesus says,” No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:62). If you keep going back, you will remain where you were. Worse, it will adversely impact your outlook towards life.
The past is a bad place to be in, even if you were better off then than you are now. L P Hartley, in his book for children “The Go-Between”, advises, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The fact that we invented the Zero or the possibility that kings in our mythology had the first flying machines will not help to feed even a single additional mouth in today’s hungry India.
A road map is immensely more useful than an atlas full of well demarcated territories. Why is the surface area of a rear-view mirror in a car less than 10% of that of the wind screen? A wise anonymous line goes – “Knowing the
road ahead is more satisfying than knowing that you
rode ahead.”
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