The Invisible Rope

All of you would have heard of the story of the elephant and the chain. Let me anyway revisit this story for you. A baby elephant is captured and chained to a staff to prevent it from escaping. It tries and tries and gives up. The chain is too strong. Soon it grows into a strong, big elephant and its chain is now replaced by a slender rope tied to a staff. The elephant can easily escape but still it doesn’t. It has given up hope because it remembers its past. The impossibility of the past prevents it from moving forward to the possibility of the future. Let’s recap this to our current lives. Not exactly great. Stuck at home doing nothing, WFH, struck by Covid ourselves or losing a dear or near one. We find it difficult to move on. The impossibility of the current past prevents us from moving forward to the possibility of the future! We are bound by an invisible rope. Come to think of it, all our growing lives we were bound by this invisible rope of expectation, parental hope, peer pressure and relationship tangles and now the damn Pandemic. There seems to be no let down. It’s seems an endless stream of happenings. Wait! This invisible rope in fact swings both ways! Backwards and forward. I had this Maths Teacher in school who told me I would never succeed in life and be an abysmal failure. She mentioned it so often that I decided to do something about it. I weighed against the invisible rope and surged forward in life. I sometimes now think, she did me a service by taunting and belittling me. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, in his book, ‘Shoe dog’, talks about the time he was a distributor for a Japanese shoe ‘Tiger’ and would have spent the rest of his life being content with the franchise until ‘Tiger’ shoes plucked the franchise. That propelled him to start Nike. Today, Nike is the world’s largest manufacture of shoes and a 59 billion empire. He too was an ordinary mortal like you and me, until the invisible rope tugged at him. Maybe, maybe… the invisible ropes in your life are meant for a reason. To serve a purpose, to fuel a cause. I am not saying the loss of a loved or close doesn’t hurt. It does. We can’t let go of the memories. I ask you not to. Instead, I ask you to move on, holding those memories close .Because that’s what they would have wanted you to do! The invisible rope is a lesson for all us. To learn, to lead and surge forward. I am one of those, whose invisible rope propels me forward and guess who I am gonna find? It’s you! Waiting as you have gripped the invisible rope by its neck and have surged forward!