Winning and losing

Recently, I had latched onto this long conversation with a lovely lass. This young interlocutor was saying, “I had felt enormously exulted, experiencing the zenith of happiness on the day I had exchanged the engagement rings with an exceedingly enterprising person.

But, one day, when he suddenly snapped off the engagement, being virtually unhinged, I started behaving like a demented lunatic. That was because I foolishly had believed he was the raison d’être of my life - the very reason for my existence.

“Yes, it did take time to restart life after that emotional devastation. But later, I began focusing on my profession and plenty of other pleasurable pastime activities, from which my mind had rambled off owing to the obsession with my onetime betrothed.

Now, when I see myself riding on humongous waves of professional success, with my placid life, poised on an even keel, I feel I have rather gained tremendously by losing some trifles!”

Yet another scintillating chat I had was with this rather sassy youngster, who was saying, “As I always exuded enormous confidence, soon after completing my engineering degree, I effortlessly had grabbed an extremely cushy job. Feeling completely complacent, I had careened myself into a cool comfort zone in that big company, till one day when many of us unexpectedly got ousted.

“Initially, I had felt quite deranged, with the world around crashing. Slowly, deploying all my inner strengths and marshalling my cerebral stuff, I began beavering away to bag a Master’s degree in business administration. Today, besides handling an intellectually rousing work, I take home a pay package four times greater than my earlier salary. I am lucky to have lost the previous job; else, I wouldn’t have landed on luxuriant terrains of this lucrative one.”

This ‘winning by losing’ can be seen in other things, too. For instance, say, we suddenly lose the services of our domestic help, who’d have worked diligently for years. But if we look at the winning side, by doing some of the domestic tasks ourselves, we tend to turn self-reliant, besides being ‘in fine fettle’ physically.

Today, many relations are getting cleaved off due to cheap ego clashes/ clamours. So here, we win back some estranged relations by losing jot of our egos. And of course, there are some bad relations, too, which when we lose, we rather win. Since losing those is more like “good riddance to bad rubbish!”

Next, there are other intangible losing, too, like losing of love, respect, trust, honour, fame, power, etc. Here losses, at times, are irretrievable with no winning sides. Finally, there are losing of tangible things that are beyond our control, like say, loss of pelf, profession, personal properties, prized possessions, etc. But whatever be the horrifying losses, it all hinges on one’s high mental resolve and resilience in handling those and hitting the final heart-gratifying winning shots in life.