`Your son has swallowed a nail’. Someone informed a man who praised the courage of his child for this (what in excitement he imagined as) adventure. The father knew his son hasn’t done it but faked that he has. After a minute the little lad squirmed with pain and the man who had admired his child for eating a piece of iron, cried out in shock, `have you really done it’. His admiration for the presumed daredevilry of his son was ideal, his shock was real. He praised the romantic but lamented the real. Imagining the reality was a joy, facing the reality a challenge. Therein lies the difference between what you imagine and what you do. Saying you have swallowed the nail is painfully different from actually swallowing it.
Whenever I mix up the real and the ideal, the story unscrambles the knot for me. This anecdote explains the dichotomy between saying and doing. What we imagine to do is fundamentally different from what we desire to do. It applies to all life situations – personal, social, emotional or political. The situations where we glorify something we know we can’t do. Wherever and whenever we hail others for doing something we can’t do ourselves and we won’t let our children do, I recall this parable.
The thrill of battling it out is initially fascinating and in some cases promising as well, but the promise soon fades. History may all be useless when seen as a chronology of stories and events. But history throws lessons for us to learn. Might has crushed the right. Sure, history has such examples too where the big and the mighty have been defeated, but there we need to see the price the weak have paid. Ask Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus who though defeated Romans but suffered such a massive loss that his victory became an everlasting allusion for something worse than a defeat.
Violence appears to be an adventure when thought of. It’s like a sealed sac whose horrors lie hidden in a fantastic suspense. Once the sac is ripped open, the horrors strike with a ferocity never imagined of. Smaller nations have been grabbed by the big ones, smaller preys oppressed by massive predators. That doesn’t mean we must offer ourselves as lambs to be eaten away by the wolves around us. A lamb can only defeat a wolf by avoiding an encounter. Resistance is intelligence, resistance is survival, resistance is nourishing your life force and not letting yourself be wasted.
Whatever our explanation for violence, whoever is responsible and wherever the roots of our problems lie, one question must make us all restless. Can we afford the cost? The moment we get the picture of a dreadful future, we shudder. Let’s learn to live before we learn to die.