The Common Element

What’s common in you and me?

When I stop at the traffic signal, almost every day on my way to work, I see different kinds of people. Few listen to music, few just look at the light waiting for the green. Few seem to be very happy and relaxed, while few appear to be worried. Some just don’t want to leave their accelerator to rest and let’s not talk about those who honk when it’s red. When I see these different people reacting differently around me I wonder,

What makes these people to be so different? What goes on in their minds? Why do they react so differently?

Similarly, when I go to a movie, I just look around and see few happy faces, few worried faces and few crazy ones. I ask myself, is there anything that’s common with all of us? Yes, I could find one common element that connects every one of us and at the same time differentiates each of us. Yes, it connects even you and me and at the same time separates us to make us two different individuals. It is common to every living being on this planet. It in fact acts as an underlying force that virtually runs this world. What is that?

What is that, that’s common to all of us and yet separates us? Simple, “Problems and the way we respond to them”.

Every day, we do something or the other either to solve an existing problem or not to get into a problem. Yes, all of us have them, small or big, tough or easy, all of us have some sort of a problem. Few call them challenges. With whatever name you call them, they are common to all of us and at the same time differentiates us by the way we respond to them. Right from a billionaire to a beggar, everyone has them. Don’t you think so? We all would have been same if we had faced exactly the same problems and responded to them in exactly the same way. But, we did not.

So what makes us react or respond to our problems differently? It’s the way we measure them. Every one of us has our own definition to it. For many, a small problem seems to be a huge one and for few, a huge one seems to be small. We define our own scales. We measure our own problems. Problem as is does not have a size property, we add it.

My mom was diagnosed with Cancer in 2007, I was with her in the hospital for about a year. I watched her going through toughest chemo’s and burning radiation therapies. I saw hundreds of patients going through the same. Everyday when I went for a morning walk with my mom, I listened to their stories, their emotions and their desire to live. I spoke to those who were blessed in life in terms of wealth and relationships to handle such a disease. They had every chance to survive yet they thought that their condition is insurmountable and lost hope. On the other hand, few even though are not so blessed to handle such a situation, they just behaved as if nothing happened to them. Everyday, I heard these contrary stories of lost hope and fights won. I understood, “The difference is not in the Cancer, It’s in the characterization of the problem”. It’s in the size of the scale on which we measure it.

Whenever you think you have a BIG problem, ask yourself, “Are you the first one to have it? Are you the chosen Sparta? ” There were numerous people who solved exactly the same problem without THINKING it as BIG. Though I cannot design a scale for measuring problems and make them look smaller, I could definitely say that, whatever problems we have today, are the same that many on this planet had, still have and already solved them. However big your problem might be and even when your mind rejects to keep it small, remember, you are not the first one.

Who is bigger, you or your problem?

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