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Sunday, December 14, 2014

My win over a trepidation

"Darr ke aage jeet hai - Success is beyond fear", though it’s a tagline for Mountain Dew but I can't agree with it more as I drove to office. Fear is fear. It is nothing big or small. We all have our own battles against our fears. I have won one such battle.

People complain about Bangalore traffic but it makes me happy sometimes when I am behind the wheel, waiting in the traffic. I drive occasionally so you might say that's why traffic doesn't bother me much but I tell you there is another reason for that.

For a long time I had an unusual phobia to ride a bicycle. While my friends and peers would ride bicycle to school, to city market, or just to play, I was struggling to make friends with gravity. To me man riding on two wheels was a far greater invention than the wheel itself. After many years of attempts I gave up. But one day my mother, on a pleasant summer evening persuaded me. And eureka! It was magic when while riding I turned back to see that my mom was no more holding my cycle. I was super confident. But then I realized that I was a grown up and my peers were already driving scooters. To my dismay I found learning scooter again was an impossible task to me. It was too heavy for lean me. I thought of giving up. But then what is life if we stop trying. What remains in life if 'to give up' becomes a habit. That's a shame!! So, after few years of trying, untrying and retrying, I bought a light-weight scooter. And I learned. But I learned something else too. That driving is not just a struggle to win over personal inhibitions but in India there is an additional challenge for girls - to ignore the mocking and staring eyes. Initially, the comments, the chases, the stares, and even attempts to hit me or touch me or make me fall scared me but then one of my experienced friends advised me that ‘ignoring is bliss’ while driving.

For a girl who struggled to ride a bicycle, I can now drive a car. But it became possible only after years of crusading against my fear and not giving up. I smile when they crack jokes about 'lady driving'. As, I understand that maybe my driving is not as perfect as a guy but I have earned it. There are lot more men too who are not able to overcome their fear for driving. So even if I drive badly, I have the courage to try irrespective of the judgmental eyes.

As the tussle with fears continues, I have discovered that trepidation for doing anything is just a crawling spider. The more one let it to crawl in the mind the more it entangles the mind in its web. So the best way out is to kill this spider with constant hammering of YES I CAN DO IT and this spider will turn out to be a myth. The feeling of winning over any fear is simply ecstatic. I have felt it and what about you?




3 comments:

  1. Aah this is a breather Roohi :).. I have been guilty of getting really irritated when I am on the road and cursing, and of course my god the honking. I felt so irritated by all of it. but then somewhere a thicker layer of skin has developed now and these things don't seem to irritate me that much anymore. Maybe all I needed was to learn the art of driving :)

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    1. I know all about the irritation Vinay,. Trust me I sit most of the times on the passengers seat witnessing the fits of my husband, my father and brother who often drives me to places :) But as far as I am concerned, I enjoy it because of my struggle and consequent win over my fear..

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  2. Roohi, tagged you in Blogadda activity in a blog post Cute Choice - http://auraofthoughts.blogspot.in/2014/12/cute-choice.html

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