Act, Don’t React!

            Hey friends! First of all I want to wish all the mothers reading my blog a very Happy Mother’s Day. What I am going to write about today is a lesson that I accidentally learnt by an incident in my day to day life and the lesson that I swear by following to the core and it has really helped me deal with my day to day difficulties in a better way. Sometimes you just wonder how such simple turn of events that destiny makes for you is to make you learn a bigger truth.

                I was travelling by my car to work and was waiting at a signal of a large and busy cross road. The signal for the opposite lane turned yellow and just then an auto-rickshaw driver trying to squeeze out of that yellow signal of a few seconds pushed his accelerator so hard that his vehicle was at a sky high speed. Well, it’s a joke about traffic in my city which is like, “If you see a green signal, you press your accelerator and go, if you see a yellow signal, you press your accelerator even harder and try if you can go, and if you see a red signal, check if the cops are looking at you, and if not press the accelerator and still go.” And perhaps the auto-rickshaw driver was trying to follow that rule. However in his rush he didn’t notice that a young couple, who were travelling on a bike had already started driving before their signal turned green from the adjacent side of the cross-road. And bang!!! The auto-rickshaw drvier rammed into the bike and the person driving the bike along with his lady fell onto the ground. They were dressed in their casual work clothes and seemed to be going to work. Luckily, it seemed as if no one was hurt, but the bike rider started abusing and blaming the auto-rickshaw driver. The latter instead of accepting his mistake, that everyone standing on the signal would agree to, stormed out of his vehicle and started throwing back the abuses. There were hand gestures, blaming, threatening and swearing. Then one caught the other one’s collar and the other one hit the first one. And within a matter of minutes the scene turned ugly. There were people who had gathered, there was so much commotion. Needless to say that the traffic came to a halt and no vehicle could move across. Ultimately a traffic cop must have been called by a sane person and he came to rescue. He dispersed the traffic and took both the parties with him to the police station ( I presume). Gradually the traffic started moving and I turned the music back in my car and started driving again.

             Cut to scene two. The same very day, while returning home, back from work, another such incident happened. This time it was at a smaller lane. An elderly man was travelling on his scooty and was probably distracted by the phone in his pocket. He picked the phone out of his pocket, saw it and was putting it back in, when he dashed into a child, riding his bicycle going back home from school. The kid was actually driving on the wrong side of the road and had steered a bit in the centre of the road. The child fell on the ground with his huge brown school bag, which must be full of his books. He seemed to have bruised his knee a bit but was unhurt. The elderly man, in contrast to what I saw in the morning, instead of shouting at the kid or creating a scene, parked his scooty on the side of the road. He then, went upto the kid and gave him his hand and helped him get up from the ground. He picked his bag and bicycle too. He then asked the kid, if he was hurt somewhere or he was okay. He even offered a ride to the kid back home. The kid was relieved. He sat down for a moment, drank some water from the water bottle tucked on the side of his school bag, smiled at the gentleman and said, “I am fine” and got on his cycle and sped away home. The man too kick-started the engine of his scooty and went his way. After seeing this incident, there was a smile on my face too. I was thinking all about it on my way back. I was thinking, how similar were these situations in the sense of happenings, but how differently they ended.

 

                  In the first scene, the youth on the bike reacted to himself becoming a victim of the accident, the auto-rickshaw driver reacted to the reaction of the youth and the crowd reacted to the whole scene and it became a mayhem. On the other hand, in the second scene, the elderly man, instead of reacting, acted upon the situation, made amends for the one who was suffering and it ended quite well. Neither of these situations was about who was right and who was wrong. Each one of them had their own faults and that is how the accidents happened. But the reactions or rather the actions in each one of the situations was different, again, neither was wrong nor right, but just different and thus the outcome was drastically different.

                  In literal meaning reaction is defined as something done, felt or thought in response to a situation or event without giving a thought to it. Reaction is actually how we would call it in medical terminology, at a spinal level. It is also what is typically known as a fright and flight reaction. The processing of the deed is not done while you are reacting. While action is defined as a deed or doing something which has some thought put into it, typically, to achieve an aim. Action usually requires the facility of higher mental abilities. The deed is perceived by your senses, reaches your spine, travels way up in the cerebral cortex, where the information is processed, analysis is done and finally according to the conditioning of your brain, a decision of doing a particular deed in response to a particular stimuli is made. Fortunately, it’s only us humans who have evolved to have this complex systematic arrangement of decision making. But unfortunately a lot of us forget that and instead of taking a breath and processing the situation make the decision to react to the situation and thus create problems for themselves and others.

 

 

                    I had heard another very interesting and amusing story from a very well-known food writer and a celebrity chef Vikas Khanna at an event. He was narrating an incident about his earlier days when he was not as famous as he is now. He was giving a live food demo in a hall full of people in America. He was preparing a savoury dish which may have needed some finely chopped tomatoes. He is saying out loud to the audience that now you put some freshly and finely chopped tomatoes and he opens the drawer of instruments but finds his knife vanished. He had a feeling that someone had purposefully removed it from there due to envy or malicious intentions. He was exasperated and didn’t know what to do in front of so many people. He knew one thing for sure that he is not going to loose his mind or cool in front of so many people in his own kitchen. He took a deep breath and started tearing the pieces of tomatoes with his hand and announcing to the audience, how in a small village in India people don’t cut their vegetables with knives as they want to respect food and tear them gently with their hands. The audience was so impressed and burst into a loud uproar of applause and suddenly he became a hero for them. Instead of the usual reaction that would have been expected out of him of getting angry or yelling, which would have earned him a bad name, he chose to act on it and it indeed rewarded him with an applause.

                   The problem is that the reactions might not always be the best course of action, and as a result, they can make others unhappy, make the situation worse. Why would we want to make things worse? The truth is, we often react without thinking. It’s a gut reaction, often based on fear and insecurities, and it’s not the most rational or appropriate way to act. Action, on the other hand, is taking the situation in, and deciding the best course of action based on values such as reason, compassion, cooperation, etc. This practice of acting and not reacting can be helpful to us to help us deal with day to day hindrances like angry spouse, road traffic, no auto-rickshaws, upset boss, incompetent juniors, and mischievous child and so on. Each time that you choose to take a pause, let your brain process the situation and choose a correct way to deal or act upon the circumstance instead of the rush of the reaction, you make a decision to avoid an ugly situation and turn things in your favor that will ultimately lead you to rise above the person that you could have chosen to react to. And if you do so, you are going to be reaping some seeds of success or happiness because it is very rightly quoted by Charles Darwin that ‘This world is about Survival of the Fittest’. 
A Chinese saying very nicely puts it,
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” –Lao Tzu.

Can you choose Action over Reaction?