New day. New beginning.

A mindset that has seen me through every hard time.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care ~ Theodore Roosevelt

The first step to effecting change is listening. Demonstrating empathy. Seeking to understand.

What you read when you don’t have to determines what you will be when you can’t help it
~ Oscar Wilde

Life is a system of checks and balances. In a company, the business team argues for increasing profits and decreasing time spent while the engineering team pushes for the time and resources required to build a good lasting product. In a country’s administration, the government concentrates on policies and reforms while the media keeps them in check through vetting and debate.

In both these cases, it might seem like there is a constant tug of war between the two groups. Like they are on opposing sides. That is how it should be. We have to advocate for the things that we understand best. That is our job. An unchecked government can grow tyrannical. Without advocacy, the business team will never understand the long term costs of technical debt.

We all have our roles to play. It is not our job to advocate for the other side. When we don’t do our part, it is the institution that will suffer for it.

There is only one key thing to keep in mind in all this. Making sure that everybody is aligned in what the shared goal is.

I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
II
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
   Someone had blundered.
   Theirs not to make reply,
   Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die.
   Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
   Rode the six hundred.
IV
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
   All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
   Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
   Not the six hundred.
V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
   Left of six hundred.
VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
   All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
   Noble six hundred!

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I came to know about this poem from the movie, The Blind Side, and looked up the full composition. I can’t follow most works of poetry without help, so I like this one for its simplicity and rhythm.

The setting is the Crimean war. A battle unanimously considered a suicide mission. The 600 soldiers knew they would not live through it but they marched onward anyway.

What drives soldiers to do what they do despite knowing the odds stacked against them? In the movie, they say it is courage and honor. I think it is a sense of purpose and the strong belief that they are helping good triumph over evil.

How about the officers giving the orders and playing roulette with their lives? In their case, I think it is the belief that the cost of not doing anything outweighs the price of war. Whether that is true, only time and history will tell.

Hope is not a strategy. It is the buoyant force that keeps us going in the darkest of times but it cannot show us the path to take or lead us to our destination.

A powerful reminder on what hope does and doesn’t do in this post on ALearningADay.

If some task comes easily to me, I usually feel like I am not trying hard enough and taking the easy road.

There are two questions here.

Is it true?
Not necessarily because it is subject to a multitude of factors that are specific to the circumstance and person.

And why does it matter?
The answer to this question is more important. The level of ease in performing a task should not determine its importance. What should influence it is the value it holds for me, measured in terms like happiness and fulfillment.

We don’t always have to struggle. Sometimes the easier path can be the right one.

Reflecting or ruminating on our thoughts and feelings is not as effective in achieving true understanding of the self as studying our own behavior through experiment and observation.

Humans have a strange perception of mistakes. We trust people to make their own decisions until the first time when they make a mistake. Once that happens, we start dismissing their opinions and decisions citing the incident as proof.

But think about it logically. Most people learn something from a bad experience. Even if it is not the same lessons that we may want them to learn, they do grow in some way. And the next mistake will make them grow even more. With the exception of when a person makes exactly the same errors in judgement in the exact same situations, every other fall makes a person get back up stronger and wiser.

If we trusted them before this point, don’t we have even more reason to trust them now?

I was asking myself this question recently. And I realised that there were two perspectives to this – outside and within.

To the outside world, courage is seeing someone standing up for herself and her beliefs in the face of opposition; doing the right thing even if it means taking the hard road.

But the person standing up doesn’t see courage, only feels it. It is not a singular emotion but a tug of war between conflicting ones. And it never feels right at the beginning. How can it when all you see is disbelief, disappointment, anger and blame in the eyes of the people you love and respect? But amidst all that negativity, you will hear a feeble voice from within telling you that this feels right. It is important to listen and hold on to it because that will eventually become your rock against the deluge of negativity that will come raining down on you.

The world only sees courage after the fledgling sapling has grown into a strong tree with deep-seated roots. During that interim time, what you will feel is not courage, but rather the lack of enough of it. You will feel doubt, guilt, shame, self-loathing and hopelessness. But listening to that inner voice will also give you a sense of peace and rightness. You need to nurture it so it can put out its roots. And if you are lucky, you will have the support of a few to deepen those roots.

Standing up doesn’t look like courage at the start. It feels more wrong than right. The only thing that feels worse is not standing up.