Multi-tasking between the past and the present and a lesson in never looking back
A few months back, I chanced upon Unmistakable Creative Podcast hosted by Srinivas Rao and I now listen to it regularly. In one of the episodes, he interviewed Seth Godin and asked him how we can let go of the narratives that bother us and keep us from making progress.
This was Seth Godin’s reply:
“I guess it comes down to which is more important… keeping track of all the injustices and people who owe you or going forward and teaching the people who are waiting for you to teach them…because you can’t do both”
The simplicity of his reply took me by surprise.
While thinking about the last few of years in my career, this statement made a lot more sense. Allow me to digress and tell you a story from my family.
My maternal great-grandfather hailed from a town called Dusi. Among his siblings, he was the only one who had a son. According to my mother, my great-grandfather had some land which had been passed down generations. In those days, only the son could inherit land from his father. This caused a lot of jealously and infighting among my great-grandfather’s siblings, who didn’t have sons, because of which their share of land would eventually go to my grandfather. This infighting caused my great-grandfather a lot of anguish. One day, he wrote a letter stating that he wanted none of the land and that it could be distributed among his siblings.
With that, he left the place of his birth.
The thing is, he never, ever went back there. Since that place only reminded him of something he wished had never happened, he didn’t want to relive any of it. My mother tells me that he never even spoke about what happened, the land he had forsaken for his peace of mind, or his siblings who had turned against him. Almost penniless, he moved to Mysore and began a new life.
When I think of it now, what he did required so much tenacity and courage.
More importantly, he was able to move ahead because he unequivocally shut the door on the past.
Ever so often, we find ourselves multi-tasking between the past and the present. We take one step back and two steps backward. Sometimes, this time travel leaves us with little energy to focus on the present and move forward. That’s what Seth Godin meant when he said ‘you can’t do both’.
Closing doors on memories that no longer serve us is probably the only way to move forward and make the contributions that we are capable of making.
