The first – I completed the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Principle-Centred Leadership” program directly under Dr Steven Covey. This program significantly changed my outlook to life in terms of deciding what my “True North” needs to be.
The second – I managed to completely stop smoking 27 years ago. For almost 20 years prior to that, I was a social smoker, smoking about six to eight cigarettes a day. I did not have the courage to inform my parents about this habit, although I have reason to believe that they suspected but were too decent to bring it up.
During that twenty-year period, like any other smoker, I must have tried several hundred times to quit smoking. But this time, on this particular date, I was in Nairobi on a business trip, was down with a bad attack of cough and flu and kept asking myself how I could consider myself as a smartass if I could not accomplish such a small feat. So, finally on 11th July 1996, I started with weekly commitments to myself, kept those, and then kept increasing the duration of commitments. I feel it has been a huge accomplishment that since that day I have not taken a single puff.
The third – during the same phase, on one of my drives back from our jebel ali office, I was witness to a horrible accident as it happened in real-time. A lady driver was speeding and one of her car tires burst. Her car was just a little ahead of mine. It flew several feet into the air, rolled a couple of times before coming to a stop. The lady was badly injured, bleeding profusely. All because of being in a crazy rush.
And the fourth turning point – during the same 1994-96 period, on a trip to Nairobi, three colleagues and I went for a night-out to a happening place called “Carnivore”, which is several kilometers out of the main Nairobi town. On the return, we got caught up in a major shoot-out between two rival gangs. In the midst of the shots that were being fired, one of the runaway vehicles, which was a large semi-pickup, hit our car. The impact was so hard that our car hit the road divider and turned over on its side. The runaway vehicle went across on to the oncoming traffic, rammed into a few cars and drove off while shots were still being fired. We could see people injured and bleeding. Because of the overturning of our vehicle, I was hurt on the left shoulder, and still carry remnants of that pain, but fortunately, all four of us came out without any major injury.
A combination of these four events that transpired around the same time 27-29 years ago, made me realize that everything that seems so incredibly important in life can suddenly become pretty irrelevant.
In the fraction of a second, the size of our bank account, the internal rates of return on our investment portfolios, the lack of hair on our head (or our gray hair), our golf score, the much talked-about “bucket list”, the type of car we drive are not really as important as we imagined they were.
On the other hand, one realizes that the reverse is also true. The things we take for granted – friends, spouse, children, relationships, safety, freedom, eyesight, health – suddenly all of these take on a very different significance.
There are times when we all feel resentful and bitter that something that fundamentally isn’t that important to the essence of life is stripping valuable time and minutes away from us … it’s accentuated even more when we see someone who has lost their life or someone who has been told as to how much time remains on their life clock.
And then we see people going completely crazy when someone just edges into their lane on a busy day.
The truth of the matter is that none of us knows how long we have on this planet. Fifty years more, or just fifty days, or maybe five hours. Make no mistake. Money, career, fame, safety-net, a good house, great holidays, bucket-lists, status……. all of these matter to each of us.
Yet, what matters above all is just getting the depth and the right balance of perspective.
Perspective – how we see things. This is something that has been on our minds for years. When we spend time thinking about numbers and progress in life and fresh starts, it’s so easy to get stuck in a particular way of seeing things. We get caught up in the numbers of life, sometimes. We think we should have had more to show for ourselves by now – more accomplishments to list, more money saved, more pounds lost.
Sometimes our perspective needs to be adjusted and put back into balance. We need to remember that many of us have been gifted so much more than we allow ourselves to see. Yet the greed continues unabated.
It is far too easy to lose sight of what we do have and what we have accomplished.
Incidents like the one narrated above have made many like me feel significantly more thankful. Thankful for the life we have led up until this moment, for the life we are living right now, and for the life that still awaits…
Here’s to 2024 and the rest of the time that is left for each of us.