Embracing unfamiliarity

This story comes from the Oriya Mahabharata by Balaram Das:

One day, Arjuna saw a strange creature in the forest, a creature he had never seen before. It seemed like a fusion of nine animals, its head was that of a rooster, its neck was that of a peacock, its back was a bull's, it had a lion's waist and serpent's tail, and its four limbs were those of a human, a deer, a tiger and an elephant.

At first Arjuna thought that it was a monster. He raised his bow to kill it. But then he realized that simply because it was a stranger did not make it a monster. A creature that does not exist in human imagination can exist in the imagination of the cosmos. He lowered his bow and the creature raised its human limb, a hand, in blessing. The 'monster' was Krishna himself, checking how much patience Arjuna had for creatures he did not recognize.

Often we come across situations that have no precedence, that do not make sense, that confound us. Our natural reaction is one of hostility. We want to shun it, or destroy it, and restore the familiar. We consider it a monster. But if we look at the monster with a different gaze: one with curiosity, seeking the familiar within the unfamiliar and a whole world of possibilities opens up.

Mark had lived all his life in New York City, a city that is designed as a grid. One can get from any point of the city to another by simply following intuition, logic or the road signs. There is no need to ask anyone for directions to get to the destination.

So imagine his surprise when he landed in Mumbai, which is anything but a grid. In fact, in some stretches, he wonders where the road actually ends. He sees hawkers on pavements, pedestrians on roads. The flyover was not quite a flyover; it was home to a whole tribe of people who were a moving market of flowers and digital accessories.

This is chaos, he concluded. He wanted to run away back to New York.

But after two days of fear, he stopped and observed. He observed the macrocosmic chaos contained microcosmic order. He observed that people did get to work on time despite the traffic jams, with a little adjustment. People of different socio-economic criteria were living in the same space.

Everyone seemed to have a mobile. He managed to get to his meetings but that involved asking for directions from four different people. Deals were being struck, various languages were being spoken, files were being moved, money was being transferred, markets were abuzz and life was moving on. It was just different.

Must every city be like New York? Must every city be like Mumbai? What is the ideal city? Mark realized that order takes many forms. And the absence of grids does not need to mean anarchy. The Navagunjara was no monster, just an unfamiliar conglomeration of different familiar creatures. The problem lay in his assumptions and expectations of how the world should be. [The author Devdutt Pattnaik is the Chief Belief Officer of the Future Group]

Here the question is not of developed vs developing or ordered vs disordered. The question is how to take the unfamiliar things or situations when we come across them. Most of the time the only things we hate are the unfamiliar or uncertain things and never want to see them. However, life is never that way and keeps them throwing at us time to time to give new experiences. When we are on a journey we should not fear unfamiliar thing and instead expect, welcome and accept it.  So better to be open to unfamiliar, embrace new way of life, places, things, relationships, knowing that we are entering into unfamiliar territory. Be ready to learn, be ready for a challenge, and be ready to meet someone that might just change our life forever. Make unfamiliar a wonderful learning experience rather than running away from it. At first, it's unfamiliar but later it strikes root.

Don't be afraid of unfamiliar situations, paths or things as sometimes they're the ones that take you to the best places to enrich your life. - Anonymous

Shared by one of my TCS colleague.