What is a challenge?
Since the inception of life on earth, living beings have been learning their way out of circumstances. An important facet of learning is that it is always accompanied by a challenging or a threatening situation and no one ever has been lucky enough to get their way through without experiencing atleast one such moment. Evidently, I too had to deal with situations which were challenging and honestly, it has been a frequent affair for me. The frequency of challenges ensured that I developed the requisite skills to overcome them and the one interaction which had the most impact is a recent incident.
Imagine going on a road trip and after a long time of comfortable ride you hit a speed breaker and the car comes to a jerking standstill. It is awful. You are stranded on a highway with no plausible way of movement. You must be thinking how a speed breaker can halt your journey. It is there to break the speed and not to kill it. But seldom times, it so happens that things get big and ugly without any logical cause and trust me, you’ll believe only when you experience it firsthand.
I experienced it when my mother was diagnosed with Stage 1 carcinoma. No one in our family ever imagined the tiniest possibility of this happening but there it was, a reality. I was in college when my father broke this news to me. I was sad and afraid about the outlook but I couldn’t cry. I had to be my mother’s strength. We started with the treatment and it was hard on her. The pain was unbearable and the medicines made her weak. Even during this time she pushed me to pursue my Interview preparation for IIFT which I had no motivation to pursue. But her persistence made me give it a chance. Her selflessness in this moment reshaped me in fundamental ways. I wouldn’t have been half the man I am if it were not for her. I cleared the Interview and my mother got into IIFT. She taught me that in times that are tough, you may get weak but still shouldn’t lose. After all, the only time you can be brave is when you are afraid.
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