After a lot of trials & tests, I made it to the squad. But could not make it to the playing XI of my school football team for a long time. And finally, the day I was selected, in the very first match, I got injured and missed finishing that match & the next few too. For a long time I kept blaming luck. After a few years, during one of the meet-ups with schoolmates, I repeated this incident & we laughed about it. But later in the evening, it struck me hard that perhaps, the painful waiting period for that call to jog in & play, was much more than the pain of the injury. During that time of wait, I had started feeling worthless, of reduced value & inferior. And that stayed with me for a long, very long time. Physical injury, heals. It may leave scars as a brut reminder. Internal wounds have no scars, but a forever, seething pain. Interestingly, in school, we would curse harder beneath our breath, when a senior from our home town would slap us for a mistake we had committed than we would to a random senior who would thrash us even without reason.
Remarkably similar is the correlation of known people taking you for a ride as against strangers making a fool of you. Imagine, when you happily lend some money to a close relative or a dear friend, versus parting with money to an office colleague. To a colleague, you remind them the approaching due date, on the due date & then taunt them every day after the due date, till you get every penny back. To the relative/friend, even after the promised due date when it is not returned, you don’t ask for it & expect the relative/friend to do so on their own. In fact, many a times, you justify to yourself why there could be delays. But you never forget that loss. Two exceptions when some of us consciously & happily part with valuable possessions are social/religious practices (such as donations, birth/death rituals etc) & doling out alms to needy/beggars, with partial and continued guilt riddance in our minds.
Distance breeds indifference. In families, we tend to avoid our own relatives and instead, prefer hanging out with friends. And in times of emergency, you believe that friends contributed more than relatives. Which may be right in some ways too. But there is always a relative who worked through silently, without seeking any credit for anything. We never acknowledge that person, leave alone appreciate her/his part. I believe, s/he may not speak out ever. But it will hurt, forever.
In corporate life, we work with multiple stakeholders. We do not frontend with everyone. There are people responsible to do so on our behalf who are supposed to share with timely and appropriate information, facilitate through the process workflow & provide backup and cover fire in times of crisis or an escalation. Being part of the same team, that is bare minimum expectation. Some support & a little empathy. Funnily, it is becoming rarer by the day. We all are getting hungry for brownie points, even at the expense of our own team. And it hurts, everyone and everything. It hurts the team’s credibility, productivity, motivation levels. But what hurts the most is the failing trust between internal team members.
The wolf of the house pierces through rather badly than the tiger in the woods.
