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Yet another timeless gem of a poem ("If", by Rudyard Kipling) of a father exhorting his son to aspire to, and become a living embodiment of all these essential virtues of "(hu)manhood"! The poem sketches out an extraordinary character of a resolutely stoic reserve; powered by an iron will, and an indomitable fortitude of spirit! Wikipedia has a note on Khushwant Singh hailing this poem as "the essence of the message of The Gita in English"!!
There's an ancient Chinese folklore that I had come across a couple of years ago. What had really gripped me about that story was the realization of just how stirring a message can be delivered through a dead simple, short narrative! The story was about a Chinese farmer who goes through a series of experiences (each stemming from the immediately preceding experience), that his neighbors pronounce as "good fortune", or, "misfortune"; and to which his own steadfast reaction every time is a calm, and neutral "Maybe". As the story unfolds, each subsequent experience lends an altogether different meaning and perspective to the preceding one.
Today, I came across a nice animated narrative of this very legend on YouTube - and this whole detachment philosophy so nicely summed up there, at the end, in the wise words of a philosopher himself!, Alan Watts -
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it is really impossible to tell whether
anything that happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of the misfortune or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
Abraham Verghese, in his book "Cutting for Stone", has said it in the same vein -
You live it (life) forward, but understand it backward.
Now, is that too stoic an attitude? Well, I had read this farmer's story in a Mitch Albom book; wherein the author himself expresses, in beautiful words, his own doubt on whether he can ever be "attached" to a religion (Buddhism) so "detached"! :-)
