The art of Losing: Who pays the price?

Snehashree Mandal

It was early morning; the wind and the leaves played for a bit, and a few weak and dead leaves dropped to the ground.

When we sit to think about who lost, it would seem like it is the tree.

But then, on close observation, you would see it is the wind.

The wind lost more than the tree in the game.

The tree just lost what was not needed, but the wind lost itself to make the tree lose those leaves. To make the environment conducive for the tree to lose, it took a lot of wind’s energy.

Most often, our life moves in circles of loss and gain. One man’s loss becomes another man’s gain. What mostly matters to people is not the loss or gain but what was at stake when they pitched for that game. The one who loses actually does not lose as much as the one who tries to win it. Since, in this entire process, there is a foreplay of power, action, and thoughts and an expenditure of time and resources.

Young Marta lost her view towards life. But she looked at the new side with a fresh pair of eyes. She could do nothing about what she lost. But she did have the option to look at everything with a fresh eye.

Most of us want to come out of our losses. It is exactly what leads us to our actions and also decisions and our choices.

The chaos and order do not survive in our wins and losses; they survive in those corridors.

The entire process of actions is sown deep within our confusions, moments of inaction, our inabilities, our deficiencies, and our disabilities.

But nonetheless, can we live without making our choices and decisions? Can we be unaffected by all these factors in this game of choices, losses, and winning innings?

The gaping holes of loss, darkness, and despair are getting wider and darker, slowly and rhythmically engulfing what is left.

Does a man love to remain in a state of confusion, inabilities, deficiencies, disabilities, or inaction where everything is unclear?

Inabilities are points where we choose not to act.

Our deficiencies are those points that we ourselves struggle to know. We often do not know what we lack, and more often we do not acknowledge it.

Our disabilities are points where the world or the universe has decided to cut us short.

In everything, we can find the chaos and order. What do we do?

1. Do we go with our choices?
2. Do we stop making our choices?
3. Do we just flow with what comes?

Most often, we choose the third option.

The first one becomes too hard. Sometimes it is us who make it hard, while at other times it is the world. Most often, a particular group of people thinks it has to be that hard for us, so it becomes difficult for us to the point that we may want to leave it out.

Next, do we stop making choices?

Someone once told me, “Beggars don’t get to choose.”

The worst part about choices is that they can be controlled.

If a beggar is not finding food in an area, it would mean two things: there are either no people around or there are just those who do not want to give to the beggar.

So the beggar has two choices—one is to move to another location, and another is to find a way to know what could make these guys pay and control those factors.

The third is, why not go with the flow of the wind or the water?

That way, it could be the fault of the wave or the wind every time someone did something wrong.

In all these, we are making millions of choices.

In between chaos and order, we often end up choosing chaos since it seems to be easy in the beginning.

Bringing order is harder since that will need rectification of many small chaos points to even fix just one thing.

Would you be interested in knowing more?

Stay tuned for some more thought processes to understand how deep we are as beings and how much we need to travel within to touch it.

(Author is a technical writer, poet, content marketer. Views expressed are personal.)