One Night, Four Lessons, Countless Inspirations: The Unexpected Classroom!
How Spontaneity Can Teach Us More Than We Imagine
Have you ever thought how sometimes the most obvious things or utterly impossible things need just one piece of evidence to turn our beliefs otherwise, or sometimes many of the teachings of life we have grown up reading or listening to just get played in front of our eyes before we take a pause to remember, Oh! this is the same moral we learnt from the story of King Bruce and the spider. Tonight, very similar kinds of incidents happened to me.
Walking past my home, I took a different turn on the road to explore a new street, although the road crossed in just front of my apartment, I never bothered to visit in the last 1.5 months. Past a few meters, I saw a beautiful skate park with a few youngsters practicing their sport there. I had already decided to only walk on the street and not go anywhere, but I couldn't resist. I had no clue that this simple five-minute visit to this park would end up teaching me lessons for life. Here I am, jotting down my learnings sitting in the park itself and wishing to fulfill the request of some of my regular readers to make short blogs.
Lesson 1: Beyond the curtain of the unattainable, often lies the stage of accomplishments already performed.
Context:- There’s this steel pole in the picture below, when I first saw it, I never would've thought you could skate on it. But then, someone gave it a shot, and well, he fell flat on his face. That person did not even wait for 5 minutes before trying a second bet, and fell again. The third time, he did it. (Story of Kind Bruce teaching persistence).
Lesson 2: What I learned is, that humans just need 1, just one example to believe that something is possible.
Context: Once that person did that, In the next 30 minutes, I saw four others successfully doing the same.
Lesson 3: YOU are more important than your fear of being seen as a failure.
Context: Observing all these skaters, one thing I am finding common in all, that whenever they are just about to fall, they are jumping off their boards, saving themselves, and then trying all over again, definitely failing a lot of times, but stressing the importance of not destroying ourselves just not to be called a failure. But doing this act is giving the skaters a new chance of striking that goal again with the same health plus more experience.
Lesson 4: Falling a hundred times doesn’t hurt if we get up immediately without letting our focus shift to our injury.
Context: I’m observing all of these fantastic people felling down repeatedly but not waiting even for a moment to reflect on the injury before achieving this new target pole or wall they planned to climb this time.
Now, keeping my promise of making this post the shortest of all, I sign off with an insider context that it’s the first blog in two years, yes! yes! two years!!, which I am typing on the spot in the skatepark doing observational writing, and that too on mobile.
As I eagerly await the lessons that these new teachers on this unexpected journey have in store, I can't help but revel in the joy of rediscovering the thrill of spontaneity. 🥳