Note From President Vineet Bhatnagar

I am taking forward my reflections on love and belonging from my last two articles.

One of the members in the audience asked a very puzzling question to Neema Majmudar when she addressed our Club
– how does a family with a differently abled child still come to live with the faith that they have been fairly dealt in life.

This question is as disturbing as the seeming inability to find a satisfying answer to it. Ms. Majmudar replied by sharing the response of a mother she met who has such a child at home. The mother told her, “We are blessed to find the purity of love and authenticity of feelings in our lives.”

None of us want to be vulnerable in our lives because in our minds, vulnerability is akin to weakness. But can anyone of us escape from being vulnerable? So, what is driving this vulnerability? To my mind, it is the intense feeling of “Scarcity”. I can best describe it as : Never —– — enough: Never good enough; Never safe enough; Never certain enough; Never perfect enough; Never extraordinary enough…

Somehow, an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life. So often we are missing out on the ordinary moments of life because most of us seem to be on a quest for the extraordinary. Not understanding that in our ordinary lives, in the most ordinary moments of our lives, we can find the most joy.

One of the things that is happening to many of us is that in a very unconscious way we are collecting numerous images and messages that amplify the sense of vulnerability / scarcity in our minds. We are either being told that we are not safe enough, somebody shows us that we are not good enough, we measure ourselves opposite others and assess that we are not extraordinary enough.

We want to do our best to escape from shame, failure, fears. The reality is that we cannot numb dark emotions selectively. When we numb shame and fear, we are, by default, also numbing the joy. If vulnerability is a sharp edge then there is nothing sharper than joy. To let yourself soften into the emotion of love and to care about something passionately is in many ways understood as getting closer to being vulnerable. And so, for many, joy comes with a sense of foreboding, because it brings vulnerability in its wake.

So, how do we embrace vulnerability? We practice gratitude – pause and be grateful for what we have; honour the ordinary that we have in our lives because many do not have even that. Find a way to compete with images of scarcity that are right in your face everyday by collecting images of people you love, your kids, your family, your
community, nature… these are all ordinary things that are around you everyday – honour them by practicing gratitude.

We all want more guarantees in our lives – that we will not get hurt, that bad things will not happen to us, and they will happen. But there is one guarantee: if we do not allow ourselves to experience love and joy, we will miss out on filling the reservoir that we will need when those hard things happen.

— President Vineet Bhatnagar