To Be

Indian mythology has at its apex three Lords — Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva — covering the functions of creation, operation, and transformation. Shiva is commonly known for destruction, but this destruction is more a dissolution for the purposes of change or transformation. Hindu mythology gives these three Gods equal merit in the functioning of the universe.

But in every enterprise, there is a constant dichotomy between running the operations and transforming the business. Enterprises are constantly trying to move effort and intent away from ‘operation’ and focus more on ‘transformation’. To an extent where ‘operations’ has become a denigrated function. I would like to put operations back where it belongs, on an equal pedestal with transformation.

From a macro viewpoint, everything in this universe is about rigorous, clockwork operations. The earth rotates around its axis once every 24 hours, it revolves around the sun once every 365 days, the regularity of the seasons, the water cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation as rains, everything is operations. God forbid, if this operation has a hitch, we would be looking at a major disruption of life. This brings us to a known but still interesting revelation — operations is critical for a smooth and efficient running of any system while transformation brings about disruption that may not always be pleasant.

Moving away from the macro and going to the other end of the spectrum let us look at ourselves as individuals. Our daily life too has a rhythmic tone to it and any change in that rhythm has a disturbing effect. We have a set routine when we wake up in the morning, have our breakfast, maybe drive our cars, get to work, get back from office, spend some time with family, and tuck in for the night. Any change in this routine upsets our rhythm and causes some stress. Even driving our car, which is a subconscious act, muscle memory, is operations. We may get from home to office on a certain day and not remember anything of the journey because the body has taken over the operations of driving us to office. A simple act of trying to brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand will upset you, till you make that a habit and it settles into a regular operations mode. This reinforces our learning from the macro view — regular routine and rhythm is relaxing while changes are stressful.

So, if transformation is disturbing, why do we constantly keep at it? Evolution is built into the innate nature of every organism. We constantly adapt, improvise, evolve. It is a matter of deliberation whether we change to adapt to the environment or our changes impact and cause the environment to change, but that is a discussion for another day. Historically evolution has taken its own sweet pace but like author Yuval Noah Harari says in his book ‘Sapiens’, transformations since the advent of Homo Sapiens have rapidly accelerated.

In the last 500 years of the scientific revolution, we have leaped from being an agricultural society to an industrial society to a digital society. In this process, we have caused significant impacts on the ecosystem. We have been instrumental in wiping out a significant number of species globally. We have been the cause of the destruction of vast green belts. We have caused global warming. We are consuming earth’s resources faster than the earth can replenish. Aug 22nd was the ‘overshoot day’ this year i.e. we consumed by that day all the resources that earth can renew in a year. At this rate, we need 1.6 earths to sustain the world’s population.

The human race is single-handedly hurtling the earth towards extinction. Is it time for us to take a pause, relook at this constant striving for change?

Do we need to learn to just ‘be’?