FINDING THE OASIS OF CALM

WITH so many people evidently out of step with others in public life, it might be useful to recall a natural law or two in our individual lives: that a convoy moves at the speed of its slowest ship and a team moves at the speed of its leader.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

So what is a suitable response if an individual is out of sync with his or her holding pattern?

The holding pattern could be long or short. For a newly-married girl, it could be that older women in the house with superior domestic skills make her feel at a disadvantage because they are faster and better at everything. For someone idealistic and hard-working in a bureaucracy or political system, it could be an agonising lack of vision, support, coordination and delivery.

It could be the smart sibling or the popular, charming one with lots of friends, who gives brothers and sisters a complex. It could be the horrible traffic, or a taxi driver who is deliberately taking the long route, or the unhelpful person on the phone, at the counter or the front desk.

What are we hapless humans supposed to do? We could look for inspiration to people in uniform, who have signed up for hours of standing still. Their mental discipline is admirable indeed. But a preliminary and necessary stage to keeping our cool seems to be to embrace our reality, to let God mark us “with his hammer of wind/ And his graver of frost”. This line is from the poem, To a Snowflake, by the English poet Francis Thompson. Published in 1897, it considers the delicate structure of a snowflake, seeing it as art sculpted by God using the forces of nature as his tools. In our case, these forces could mean our frequently difficult circumstances.