"...make me an instrument of...

Recently I came across a message twice that read something like this: Unless you are capable of violence you are not capable of true peace because unless there is a streak of violence in you, you are essentially harmless.

I know the vocal and verbal violence I am prone to and the violence that lurks beneath the surface looking at all the injustice and unfairness in the world. It’s a violence that I manage to become aware of and try to keep under check and manage to do so, most of the time. But when it erupts, my family members and an occasional neighbour see it and hear it.

From the age of 10, I have been inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and what he tried to do with the lurking anger at the injustice of it all. I do not claim, by any stretch of imagination that I am anywhere close to him in terms of non-violence or his self-mastery.

Maybe I have a couple of generations to go and maybe I need to be meditative at least 8 hours a day in the midst of a noisy and chaotic traffic signal; daily for the next 3 - 4 years at least before I can achieve some degree of continuous self-awareness and self-regulation as they say in emotional intelligence.

But surprisingly I have been a huge fan of Sylvester Stallone for the character he created, played and kept reinventing from Rocky in 1976 to Rocky Balboa in 2006.

It was always hard to put to words why I and millions of people across the world and across generations have felt inspired by Rocky Balboa: both the character and that timeless background music track that uplifts one’s spirts to get up and fight once more and then once more and then once more and then some more.

Today as I finally watched the documentary Sly on Netflix I learnt a lot more about Rocky and his creator’s life shaping experiences that came out in the form of the Rocky series and the triggering experiences behind each of the films in the series.

And while I have my empathy and sympathy for Stallone for his regrets in life, I still remain grateful for what he created in his art work through the Rocky series and the film John Rambo that came out in 2008.

Even as an atheist I still have a collection of prayers that I have retained from my childhood.

When I watched John Rambo in 2008, I was quite perplexed to see Stallone use one of my favourite prayers by Saint Francis of Assisi in a scene before he departs to rescue the hostages through a gory blood bath.

But today I understand better.

It’s easy for someone like my wife to be peaceful because she is born one but for someone like me with a default value of fairness and truthfulness and compassion being an acquired value, the challenge and struggle is real and daily.

As I got up from the documentary and washed my face to write this, the following lines emerged out of me:

I am looking at a face that won’t exist soon

I am looking at face that would change forever as it has in the past 49 years

I am looking at what would soon become a memory

And a memory that might fade soon thereafter for me and others.

So what am I really looking at?

I know not what destiny holds for me.

Destiny is a word that I don’t understand when I look at the injustice and unfairness of things in the world.

And yet I know that it is not for me to know and figure out everything as I too am meant to die with more questions un-figured than sorted.

In the end, I take refuge in two of my favourite prayers and Captain Nathan Algren’s reply in the film The Last Samurai: “A man does all he can till his destiny is revealed to him.”

So may it be…