Be Like WATER!!

There is one scene in the movie “Enter the Dragon” in which Bruce lee preaches a kid. One particular dialogue says ‘be like water’. If one contemplates upon this, this has a lot to teach us.

            Water doesn’t have a shape of its own. It takes the shape of the container in which it is present. That’s its inherent quality. It doesn’t distinguish between the kinds of the container. It just takes the shape without any pre-judgment. Once it is out of the old container and placed in the new one, there will be no traces of the old one.

            This principle can be applied to our personalities. The personality should not be rigid. It should be fluid-like. In fact, it is better to have no personality! In life, we face gamut of experiences. If we don’t have any personality, we can act completely to the challenge at the given moment. If the personality is strong, the action will never be complete because, personality is always of the past. One can never act completely in the present if he/she is burdened by the past.

            It is time for us to leave the burden of the past and act completely at the present.

The 'Nice Guy' problem

Some of us have this desire to develop and cling to the ‘nice guy’ image, to be good to all and so on. First of all, the very idea is flawed. I am beginning to see the truth of it of late. It is impossible to be nice to all. However you are, there will always be a set of people who talk nasty about you. So, trying to please everyone is really futile. It is better to be haughty than to ‘try’ to be meek.

            I can talk with some amount of authority on this because I am a victim of this disease of pleasing everyone. Today I had to encounter one of my class mates who thinks himself intelligent (he’s an atheist, I think most of the atheists have this problem!!) in a verbal feud over some matter. I was dominated. These days I am dominated quite easily I thought. Then suddenly truth dawned upon me and I decided to document it. This was all the problem of ‘nice guy’ image I judged.

            In his famous book, 7 habits of highly effective people, Stephen Covey has written quite well about this. He classifies the people of above image as lose/win people. To quote him” win/lose people love lose/win people because they can feed on them. They love their weaknesses- they take advantage of them. Such weakness compliments their strengths. But the problem is that lose/win people bury a lot of feelings and the unexpressed feelings never die: they’re buried alive and come forth later in uglier ways”

It is time to strip the image and come clean!!