Where Do You Start - When You Have To Start All Over

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* 'Illustration accompanying the fairy tale, 'The Ugly Duckling'. illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen, story by Hans Christian Andersen', wiki. Life was one lonely terrain for the cute little cygnet, ostracized and shunned as he was by the rest of the barnyard fowl because his body and physique was so "hideous", so "abnormal" because it was so "different" from the rest. It was only when the "duckling" morphed into a beautiful swan, in fact the most beautiful swan of them all, that fellow fowls realized what a gem they had all along been having in their midst. Morphing, you see, is a necessary and unavoidable part of our life if we have to realize our fullest potential. Otherwise we will spend our entire life as a duckling, out of place and out of tune with the rest of the society, never arriving at the true station we deserve.
Begin By Accepting That You Have To Start Afresh - And Then Reinvent
Have you seen one of those morphing softwares in action? There is a bunch of cute little video clips uploaded on YouTube, where they show structural changes taking place in people's faces in the span of a few seconds. Not only the face, but their entire personality too undergoes a transformation. What the YouTube clips do not show, because that was not their intention, is how the course of these people's lives too change in that span. The clips end in a few seconds, and sometimes they take a minute or two to unfold the magic. We know of course that the metamorphosis sometimes takes more time.

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Clip showing age morphing - YouTube / neuroshment. These clips focus on the face and show how it morphs with aging. Even more interesting than seeing the morphing of the face is to see the morphing taking place in these people's lives.
While the video-clip makers can press CTRL+Z and undo the metamorphosis if they don't like the end outcome, you and I know we can't do that. We don't have a CTRL+Z option. We know that once we have arrived to a state of existence, it is irrevocable; you cannot undo the changes; you just cannot go back to the earlier state of existence, it just is not possible; circumstances shackle and restrain, holding you in chains that give very little leeway, just enough for you to move in a direction that you are now expected to, asked to, move.

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* Dragonfly (unidentified species) in process of metamorphosis. The adult is undergoing its final moult. Image has been rotated 90° for easier viewing - wiki. For some living beings, the morphing happens in the physical realms. Don't know if some change happens in their mind, too. For us human beings, however, what matters most is the metamorphosis taking place in the mind.
It was about a year ago that I had taken a similar snapshot of some people, people who were undergoing - or were on the verge of undergoing - some profound change at some level or other of their existence. Would be an amusing - reflective? - exercise, I thought, to take another snapshot of these same people a year hence, and see what kind of life-changes these people have undergone. May be some of us might relate with one or the other of these life threads? (Here is the post with the earlier snapshot: Accept Changes Beyond One's Control. It would help if you go through this post first, in order to make sense of what is being discussed here.)

Morph #1 - From Wife To Widow

The banker wife of friend Jerry, the stock-market trader, followed the stretcher carrying her husband as he lay in coma following cardiac arrest. That day, true to his usual swashbuckling style, the trader had once again betted heavily on intraday swings on the bourse, without remembering to also put in place stop-loss figures in the system for the scrips he had wagered would change his fortune. What did he know, that that was precisely the day the CEO of a company would choose to call a press conference and confess the arithmetic errors committed by him in his company's balance sheet?


The day was January 7, 2009, the day when the fortunes of a couple of hundred thousand people across the globe morphed sharply, all because the CEO had forgotten what two plus two equaled. As the stream of words tumbled from this man's mouth in remorseful confession, his company's scrip tumbled like nobody's business. And dragged down the rest of the market. And took Jerry down along with him. While the press conference morphed the CEO's life from jetting-across-continents to a life of being-driven-between-the-court-and-the-prison-cell, a life of confinement and quiet introspection, it took Jerry to the ICU. When the banker wife emerged from the hospital, the husband had to be left behind to complete usual formalities. A few hours later, in a brief ceremony preceding the cremation, they plucked away all the totems from her body that symbolize wifehood in her culture. The morphing from wife to widow took about five-odd minutes.


They say that at the moment of death, the entire span of life lived up till that point flashes past the eyes. In those five-odd minutes taking her to widowhood, her wedded life must have flashed past her eyes, starting from the point of time when they first met, the subsequent marriage that took place against the wishes of the family and community who disowned the newly-wedded couple, forcing the couple to relocate to a new city with nothing save two suitcases of clothes, some cash in wallet and oodles of hope and abundance of faith in one's fortune, just so to start a new life from cipher, post-marriage. For the wife-turned-widow, starting all over again is not a new phenomenon.


With the major breadwinner not around, the family is now like a set of wagons unhitched from a superfast hi-tech engine and left to shunt from this yard to the next, left to find speed on their own. As if life is now asking them to view the world from a different angle altogether. Besides her marital status, the morphing has relocated her to a more economical neighborhood and to adopt a more frugal lifestyle; for selling off the house had become unavoidable to settle outstanding debt. The job in the bank is not sufficient to maintain the earlier lifestyle. The son has now reconciled himself to apply in local colleges - no dreams of an undergraduate course in any foreign country for him for the time being. When you have to start over, you have to start from the cipher, indeed.

Morph #2 - From Careerist To Home-Maker

The careerist who chucked her cushy job in a government research organization to make a lateral move but with a higher paycheck to a private company in faraway Texas knew it was coming. The signs were ominous all year long. People in the office complex were beginning to be laid off in droves, as were the colleagues in her office. She felt actually relieved when her own marching orders came. For it made her own decision-making about her career, much easier.


Right from the time she relocated to the new city for the new job, Life started negotiating bends and turns that were never before experienced. Touching base with the spouse and the kid began becoming more and more infrequent because of both the distance and the work-pressure. May be it was the loneliness that got to her while being away from the warm comfort of the family; maybe it was the hallucinations that dance their miasmatic dance in your head when you are alone and feeling guilty of having taken some action that doesn't quite vibe.


The phone conversations increasingly became more matter-of-fact, more formal, and more distant than even the distance of the geography. Till the time came when the person at the other end of the line sounded more like an indifferent, touchy stranger than the loving, caring spouse who she had spent a major part of her life with. What happens when you dial a wrong number? The other party either simply hangs up abruptly, or expresses their displeasure in such a high-pitched irascible voice --- that you want to hang up immediately. Of somewhat similar nature became her experience. And her suspicions of a huge crevasse rapidly forming in the up-until-now solid bonding between them were confirmed when she went home in the holidays. While things didn't appear to take such an ugly turn in the lives of the other career-minded couples around her, unfortunately they were taking such a turn in her case. Clearly, it was a choice between career and family.


The marching orders from the company helped her make up her mind. Circumstances took the decision on her behalf. The morphing from careerist to home-maker happened in the span of that one second, when she received her job-termination letter in her hands. Took her less than an hour, she says, to clear her desk, pack her bags and vacate her apartment and rush to the airport to catch the next flight to the place that is her home.


The husband has over the past two decades assiduously built up a brick-and-mortar business that relies heavily on local and regional clientele. For him therefore to trail the wife wherever her career took her is not possible. The crevasse is healing because both the parties are putting in the effort to heal it. The husband must have been touched with the wife's gesture. The careerist-morphed-into-home-maker is now happy with her family, assisting the husband in whichever way she can, when she is not busy calling up potential employers in town. When you have got to start over, you have got to start over!

Morph #3 - From IT Honcho To Farmer

The friend from Delaware could not take it anymore. With recession sweeping through the world in the past one year, it was not possible for anybody to hire him at the cost that he had gotten used to receiving as salary. And the idea of accepting a job where he was required to sit at an ordinary workstation along with the riffraff and keep glancing at the wall clock and follow a strict office routine - did not appeal. He was used to the swank, glass-walled office of his earlier job - with his own secretary sitting in the antechamber - where he could come and go as he pleased. On top of that, the very thought of having to report to some @#$%^& who didn't know what they were doing, and who in his previous life he wouldn't have hired to even open his car door (his words), leave alone give them supervisory positions - was just too much. And then the time came when even such jobs evaporated. No, he could not take it anymore.

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* Clip from the 1999 movie "Office Space", performed by Ron Livingston and Gary Cole, YouTube / rhomis. We create organizations with great dreams, but somewhere along the way, we get bogged down in red tape and procedures. Like this TPS report and the memo, for example. No wonder people feel so suffocated and out-of-place, wanting to get the hell out of the job, but having to stay put because either there is no other alternative or because the alternatives too are all the same. When the suffocation becomes unbearable and the urge to break free becomes overpowering, then morphing happens.
Squaring up the mortgage and other debt by selling the family jewelry was the easy part. Getting the three-hundred-fifty cartons shipped from his adopted homeland to his ancestral home deep in the hinterland of his native country was the easy part. What proved difficult was the morphing process. He may have changed the country of his operations, but that didn't change the economic conditions - they were still the same. His earlier persona of IT honcho didn't fit in with his present reality, and he didn't want to waste his life sitting through the recession and waiting for better times to come. He was in need of some serious morphing. But morph to what? That was when somebody suggested he take up farming.


A visit to the barren fields in a nearby village was all it took to decide what he was to morph to. He saw in the barren fields opportunity for growth and prosperity.


The man and his family are busy nowadays in starting their life all over again. A new lifestyle has begun: from the six-lane highways driving in monstrous cars to the un-asphalted, dust-sprayed roads sitting atop some rickety tractor driving to his farm is a huge transformation. True to form, he has already prepared ambitious business plans that he says will help him achieve in the next few years, the same income levels he used to enjoy in his earlier avatar. When you have to start all over again, you start all over again in style!

Morph #4 - From Doormat To Divorcee To Somebody's Heartthrob

That there is a limit to sacrifices and compromises that one can humanly make for "the sake of the family", was realized when somebody threw some more shrapnel of insult and abuse towards her, dipped in the poison of guilt that whatever bad happening in the family was somehow her fault. Somebody was as usual venting their problems at her, their criticism and confrontation directed towards making her feel responsible for whatever bad was happening to them, this act of abrogation in turn making them feel good. Nothing new about the shrapnel, they had become her daily diet. It was perhaps that that particular day it suddenly dawned on her that she was up to her eyes in the deep mire of self-imposed guilt and that if she didn't scream, the mire will choke her and she will die. The problem was, she was to reflect later, that she had decided early on in marital life to be "nice" to everyone in the family, to please everyone, never mind if that meant that she give importance to everybody else's priorities and wishes and fancies to the exclusion of her own. Didn't help matters that her husband was his mamma's boy. He never grew up to be a responsible adult, one who would stand up for his wife's rights as a worthwhile member of the household.


It had then become very convenient for everybody around, including the extended family members, to begin using her as doormat to wipe their muddied shoes on. Using another analogy, once people got to know her buttons, knew exactly what button to press and when and for how long till they received the desired response and action from her, oh then it became very easy.


The morph from doormat began happening when she decided to wrest away the control panel from the hands of the others and keep it to herself. The morph from doormat began happening when she decided to stop subjugating herself for "the sake of the family" and to assert her own rights as a fellow human being. This new avatar was greeted with horror and gasps and shock by the rest of the household, including - and most-importantly-including - the husband. It then became clear that from the status of the slave, subjugated doormat, the only persona she could morph to was that of divorcee. Which she did last year when the court formally declared her free from all the dysfunction.


That was last year. In this interim, she has begun seeing someone, a colleague in her office who too has recently emerged from a messy divorce. It is not difficult for wavelengths to match when experiences are similar. The earlier life of the doormat is already a distant memory; the twinges are no longer so sharp. And all she can talk about now is of this new heartthrob. To be in love and also to be loved must indeed be a warm life-enriching feeling.


Do you relate with any of these life threads yourself? Is something similar happening in your life? How are you coping?


Creatures of habit, all of us. We keep looking at the past and the way we were and how things used to be. We wish we could return to and remain in the state of existence that we used to live in, howsoever uncomfortable it was then. The comfort of familiarity is our psychological abode of refuge. But when Fate shows Her Hand, when circumstances force their way, a realignment takes place in the planes of our existence, and the door on a familiar lifestyle closes. The time for the morphing arrives.

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* 'First edition cover of the novella - 'The Metamorphosis' (Die Verwandlung) by Franz Kafka, published 1915' - wiki. Kafka's Gregor metamorphosing into a gigantic insect is of course a philosopher's creative mind going hyper-active. But in our own life too, we metamorphose equally dramatically, sometimes even more so. And this metamorphosis happens when our thoughts shift from what we are to what we can be. All aided and abetted by the whiplash of circumstances.
When the chips are down, what should we do? Very simple it is to preach, I know, but the only answer that comes to mind is this: Reinvent. Morphing is another name for reinventing. We have to stop trotting on the pony of old tricks and stop relying on the tried-and-tested of old props. Find new skills, or brush up existing ones. Reach within ourselves; find out what else is in there that has yet to be harnessed. Visualize what we always wanted to be. Regardless of how daunting the odds appear, to decide to make the effort. To try, to reach out. To approach life with fresh enthusiasm. The morphing is a must in life, for that is sometimes the only way for us to leap to new heights of success and fulfillment that we know we deserve.


You have to start somewhere. Take this moment, this moment of NOW, and start over.



Film clips from the 2000 movie - "Cast Away", performed by Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt and Nick Searcy, YouTube / pagontradLT.

Chuck had everything going for him. A nice job as Systems Analyst with FedEx, a fiancee in Kelly who loved him as much as he did her, life looking all set. And then his plane went down somewhere in the Pacific. Chuck spends four years - 1,500 days is what he chalked on the flat of the rock - on that godforsaken island. He didn't have his house on the island, he didn't have his job on the island, he didn't have his car on the island, but he had his Kelly on the island. And when he returns, he gets back his job, he gets back his house. He also gets back his car - all preserved and topped-up by Kelly for that last, poignant ride together. But he does not get back his Kelly. Somebody else gets to call the dib in the meanwhile, you see.

Sitting in the car under the downpour, there are two roads before them. One, the straight road ahead, would take the couple to a new unknown. The second, the bylane to the right, would take her back to her house - back to her husband and kid. The two do the math in that split-second, and Chuck drives the car back to her house.

As for Chuck, he has to continue breathing, for he knows that the sun would rise again the next day, and who knows what the tide will bring?

If you are at that point in your Life where you have to start over again and don't know where and how to begin, you might perhaps relate to the reflections of Chuck in the final scenes of the movie.

The title of this post has been taken from the advertisement promo of this movie.