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Beating the fragility syndrome
Very often we confuse the quality of vulnerability with fragility. I feel there is a fundamental difference between the two. Human vulnerability is in fact the strength of our race - that quality that helps us give in to our emotions and helps us to think more with our hearts than our heads.
- By Suchitra Bajpai Chaudhary, Senior Features Writer, Friday Magazine
- Published: 23:24 July 26, 2008
Very often we confuse the quality of vulnerability with fragility. I feel there is a fundamental difference between the two. Human vulnerability is in fact the strength of our race - that quality that helps us give in to our emotions and helps us to think more with our hearts than our heads.
Fragility, on the other hand, is this quality of being broken or destroyed easily and that is in every manner you perceive, our weakness.
Of late, our lives have become increasingly fragile. We succumb both physically and mentally and morally as well with the slightest push. So much so that I think every time we step out of our homes or get ready to drive to some place, we need to post a sign outside that says: "Human life here, handle with care."
A tiny tumble, a bump, a rough ride, a lurking bomb in the alley, all it takes is one shattering episode to draw the curtains on our life.
The planet may be exploding with our ilk, but that does not take away from the beauty and significance of an individual life.
Those girls who died in a horrific minibus accident on the roads of Dubai last fortnight were someone's wives, sisters, mothers and daughters. They came to Dubai with unfulfilled dreams, were probably the only breadwinners of their family and their lives were snuffed out in an instant, so cruelly.
Even as I write this, thousands of young lives are lost to futile designs of a few - bomb blasts, genocides, suicide bombings, car accidents, arson ...
Death is an inevitable fact of our mortal life, but what really bothers me is fragility of our souls. Every little tug, every ugly exposure we wither away bit by bit dying. Things happen, we react and somehow, it kills some emotion or some sentiment in us. We deaden ourselves and numb our conscience to go on with the business of living. Those are our survival instincts. But that plays havoc with the person we are inside the façade that we so laboriously build.
Blurring of margins
The elements that die within us have to do with our compassion, empathy, sensitivity, and ethics and when these asphyxiate, the margins blur.
Some argue that watching and reading about so much ugliness and horror in our everyday lives, raises our pain threshold. But I think it simply makes us a little less human than we are. I can visualise our humaneness in tiny dot pixels tightly packed on the fabric of our conscience. And when we say we die a little each day, it's these dot pixels that fade away or burn out like old stars in the galaxies. With the fading away of every dot pixel the luminosity of our soul dulls bit by bit. I fear about the luminosity dipping so much that one day we might turn into mere shadows of ourselves, or plain robots.
When I speak about fragility, it is not just the fact of our mortality; it is this quality of our lives as human beings that gets erased bit by bit. It is those reckless drivers on roads, those bombers, those cold-blooded murderers and killers I worry about.
In need of healing
They are the ones who have snuffed out many of those dot pixels of humaneness in them and are probably lesser beings but pass off as human beings. It is these people who are probably more fragile and in need of healing.
But how does one heal these people? That's the challenge. It's the classic Titanic situation of too many people clamouring to be saved and too few lifeboats and that seals the fate of many.
I have worked out a simple solution for this. When in any kind of crisis, moral or mental, I try to search for that life boat within. There is that real "you" within. Unburden and peel all the layers of pretence and make-belief and confront that real person within. It's the best bet you have. That deep core of you is indestructible, beyond all fragility and that will help you tide over all these fragile episodes in life.
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