When I was younger, I used to think that Success (whatever that might mean) was a matter of working hard. I felt that I had the brains to go far, and I thought that I was already cultivating a good and kind personality, and that all I needed to do, to achieve “Success”, was to work hard. Of course, now that I am in my 40s, I recognise more than ever that much of what we attribute to ourselves, by way of Intelligence or Kindness or Hard Work, or any other so-called driver of “Success”, pale into the background when we truly reflect on how much of Life can consist of random things that happen to us.
One of the iconic metaphors for this, in our modern age, comes from that 1998 movie Sliding Doors, in which the chance occurrence of making it through the sliding doors of a London Tube train, or otherwise, might lead to very different circumstances in one’s life. There is a whiff of quantum mechanics here: the uncertainty of random occurrences leading to multiple, wildly-different outcomes.
Understandably, however, many of us moderns would prefer to not think about how random life is. We all like to think that our “Success” is due to our own hard work and effort, that we “deserve” the perks and perquisites that we now enjoy.
Paulo Coelho, for one, has made a tonne of money out of his popular book, The Alchemist, which assures the reader that his or her “Treasure” is waiting for each and every one of us, and that the entire universe (no less!) is constantly conspiring to make sure we achieve what we set our hearts to.
Rhonda Byrne is another writer who has probably made a tidy fortune for herself by assuring readers that positive thoughts and positive visualization will have a direct impact on the self – that there is a “Law of Attraction” that will guide us towards what we desire. We just need to “visualise” and “manifest” our desired outcomes: that promotion at work, that soulmate that we have been waiting to swipe right on, that first million dollars, that “unicorn” business idea.
All this assurance, of course, is catnip to the middle-class bourgeois populace that not only believes, but desperately wants to believe, that life is “fair”, that we just need to work hard and things will fall into place. It is too unnerving, even maddening, for most of us to believe that Life can be more random than we care to imagine.
But at this vantage point of my life – no longer young, but perhaps not yet too old! – I can look back at too many episodes in my life, to know that the “sliding doors” metaphor is real. Of course, hard work and effort remains important in life – I am not that naive to imagine that everything just falls into our laps based on some random dance card up in the sky – but I believe that there is a larger role for random occurrences in our lives than we would like to admit.
If my father hadn’t left us when I was four, would I have become a different person? Less melancholic, maybe more confident in his self-worth? What kind of person would have emerged if I had both parents through my childhood?
If I had done just slightly better in my UPSR exam (instead of the 3A and 1B that I eventually got), would Sekolah Alam Shah have thrown me out after four days of orientation? What kind of person would have emerged out of five years at Alam Shah, instead of the five years in Ayer Keroh that has now become an integral part of my youth?
If I hadn’t gotten that phone call from Adlan Benan Omar, would I have gotten into Cambridge? I hadn’t made the grades for my STEP papers, and Churchill College let me go – what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten pooled into Magdalene? My UCAS “insurance” was Southampton – what kind of person would have emerged out of three years on the south coast?
If I had married that girl that I was head over heels for, or if that other girl had become my wife instead, would I as happy as I am today? Would I have ended up a Petronas GM, with a double-storey house in Ampang, with three kids in tow? Or a brow-beaten husband, miserable and unhappy? Or perhaps, divorced and alone, living on my own?
If I hadn’t sat next to Omar Mustapha during that Promuda dinner, or hadn’t answered that newspaper ad for “Blue Skies” back in 2003, would I have ended up working for Pak Lah? Would I have gone on to do those years in Pemandu, if my sliding doors had led me to a different career trajectory?
So many different “sliding doors”, and there are probably millions more multiverses out there in which my life could have turned on a dime, and had come out totally different from how it has come through to today.
The expected modern take on “sliding doors” metaphor would likely be a sense of rejection. “My success is my success. I own my life”, one might say.
But I find, upon reflection on how my life has turned out, that more than anything, I feel suffused by a deep sense of Gratitude – that Life, for all its turbulent turns, has taken me into the maelstrom and has guided me to this place, here and now, where my life is Kind and Good. I have a roof over my head, a wife who loves me. I see my mother often, we talk about old times. My family is happy and healthy. I have a job that pays the bills and then some. I go on holidays.
“Which, then, of your Lord’s blessings do you deny?” – I think about this a lot, in these days. I look at myself in the mirror: greying hair, lines on my face. Yes, I have been disappointed, many many times in my life. But even with all those setbacks and failures, through all those sliding doors that I made my way through as well as the ones that closed shut before me: here I am, now, in this Life. It is Kind, and it is Good.
