When the road you are trudging seems all uphill….

Sometimes in life, a lot of bad things happen to us. The moments are insufferable, the days miserable and life in general unbearable! We crib, we cry, we shout out in agony. Why me? We hope, we pray, we wish the situation away. And then we gear ourselves to fight it out. Slowly and surely the bad situation turns around becoming better and better. And we realise that all that hardship was the struggle of the caterpillar before it became butterfly.
Sometimes the worst things in life turn out to be the best things. I remember a story by William Somerset Maugham, “The Verger”. We had this in our English syllabus in school. A verger is a person who assists in the religious services in church. Albert was an old-time verger at St Peter’s, Neville Square. One day, the vicar called him and said to him that he had just got to know that Albert was illiterate. The vicar wanted him to learn to read and write or quit. Albert chose to quit. He was down and disheartened and kept walking up and down a long street. He craved a smoke, but could not find a tobacco shop. Not quite believing that a street this long and important did not have a tobacco shop, he walked down the street again. Confirmed that there was no tobacco shop, he pulled together his small savings and set up a tobacco shop on that street. Business thrived and he set up another such shop and then another. Soon he had shops across London. He would bring his collections to the bank every week. One day the bank manager called him and suggested some investments in financial securities. Albert declined saying that he would not know what was happening to those investments as they are all in paper. When Albert revealed that he was illiterate, the bank manager was stunned. How could Albert have built such a massive empire! What would he have done if he were literate! Albert had the answer to that. He would be verger of St Peter’s Neville Square!
My mother worked in a school and one fine day the headmistress of that school was asked to quit. This lady had been loyally working for the school for long years and she was totally broken when this happened. To top it, her husband worked in a private company which was moving out of town. He was asked to either accept the transfer or retire. He chose to retire. At this juncture, when things were all down, the couple took a huge risk. They had some land around their house. They set up a school. Though modest in the beginning, with a few primary classes, the school has prospered over the years. It is now a reputed school. They had to buy another plot of land to shift the higher classes there. A perfect example where a disaster of life heralded great growth and success because they never gave up.
Another verger example…my cousin was a victim of the road widening process in a mid-level city of India. His little shop, the livelihood of his family, was knocked down by the authorities when roads were being widened. The compensation he got was paltry. In desperation, he obtained an agent license for life insurance. Initially, it was tough but he progressed. Now, he has reached a stage where he no longer needs to seek out clients, people seek him out when they need to get a life insurance policy.
Thanks to the media, we get to know of so many people who have fought it out. A quadriplegic who climbed mountains, a sexually abused adolescent who became one of the world’s most popular media angel, a broke, divorced clinically depressed single mother who wrote bestsellers.
Tough times do not last, tough people do. We have been hearing this since childhood. I thought it was just blah. But as I grow older, as a few strands of hair turn grey, as a few wrinkles show up, I start acknowledging the truth in this. And I also realise that it is just not the drive to fight, but the perseverance to keep going that matters. Let’s fight it out or wait it out. Never say die till I die!