Attitudinal Heroism is What Our Mothers Show: Happy Mother's Day
Delights of the Ordinary No. 65. Season 3.
Delights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter is your guide to elevate everyday lives through the lens of virtues and inner character, work culture, creativity, and emotional psychology amidst our practical 9-5 job space.
Yes, I, too, was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera - the Panther - and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away;
- The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Sometimes the world gets a bit much!
Isn’t it?
Like nations blatantly slipping into the lacuna of fighting battles, devastated political borders, our attention span shrinking to that of a goldfish and AI memorising human tactics at a lightning speed, threatening our jobs and whatnot.
Hence, in this overcrowded dross world of multiple catastrophes, I conjure enough courage to show up in your inbox, making some tiny tweets in the huge hope that my letters may serve as a lyrical nourishment amidst the cacophony of our world.
So, when I write to you, I am not essentially tackling topics that chart a five-year plan for career advancement, but talking to you about the things essential to life. Since these things are effortlessly bludgeoned under our overworked ordinary lives.
But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
If you were a part of the 90s era, like I was, then you would remember the simple joy of watching Clark Kent flying over the city of Metropolis as Superman, with his red cape and his red-blue skin-tight garment on. And, if you had brains like mine, then in your heady imagination, you too would have soared high like Superman, bolting like greased lightning in the sky, saving people from the criminal mercenary.
Wasn’t that excitement of childhood precious!
In those days, we had hero etched into us. If nothing more, then still a dandy dear desire to remain one. However, “[i]n our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush…” writes Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death. For in our modern world, heroes are not merely flying in capes or soldiers with bulletproof jackets, but they are ordinary people of flesh and heart, working under low-roof, air-con cubicles, living in tiny homes, walking on the tar roads yet holding something heroic in their muscles, mood and attitude.
Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighted by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints, the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it.
- Walter Lippmann
Then what is attitudinal heroism?
In one paper published in 2010, scientists reported that people who engaged in one-time acts of bravery, like rescuing someone from the rail track of an oncoming train, are not much different from regular people or the non-heroes. By contrast, there are people who engage in lifelong heroism without being termed as heroes, like professional nurses who regularly comfort the sick and the dying. These ordinary people with ordinary jobs share important personality traits such as empathy, nurturance, and a need to live by moral principles.
Researchers also suggest that heroes aren't just compassionate and caring; they also have a gift for being able to see things from the perspective of others, the ability to "walk a mile in another man's shoes".
And that is attitudinal heroism!
The attitude of retaining a sunny outlook towards life and the guts to take courageous, compassionate actions in our day-to-day clutter and muddles of life.
To All Motherly Heroes
And to tell you frankly, this would be the toughest sort of thing to do. Yet, that is what most of our mothers did, and maybe some of you are doing as mothers right now. Developing and exploring empathy, nurturance, and holding tightly on to your little nests and your hatchlings, without giving up on your moral principles.
For most of us, our mothers had tougher circumstances compared to the generation we are in. They, in their margins, stood the patriarch, the cultural arm-twistings of many sorts, while tenderly holding the pieces of their shattered self-worth. And whatever was given to them, they did a tremendously terrific job in raising us up.
Time may lose its shape, our lives may become less poetic, yet the attitude of our inner being will matter in its habitual way all the way, till the end. Because heroes are not always holding up the divine work of saving people. They are also mending their inner structure to deal with more than what they asked for. And hence, heroism isn’t just for applause, it is largely a visible attitude in its most mundane, jaded, reluctant and barely thrilling phases.
And, there we are, maybe to go home and find our mothers doing their usual stuff of sewing or sowing, or find them just a call away, or at the very least, find them in our memories if they are no more to be found on this earth.
But go back and honour the hero in them. Even to all those who gave us motherly care, those who gave us the bosom-hugging love and assured us it would get better, who held our hand to pull us above the waters and comforted us.
Find ways to celebrate and appreciate them!
This is the hope that even if AI can take over the earth, be trained like human-brain-sized models on enormously difficult tasks, and perform as many computations as have been done "by evolution" yet humans are guarded with love and that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.
I wish all mothers a very happy Mother’s Day!
And here’s to some internet finds.
To read: Author Cheryl Strayed writes, “Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.”
To music: Brendan Chilcutt’s The Museum Of Endangered Sounds preserve the famous sounds of old technologies and electronic equipment. Some total nostalgia to hear!
To End:
THE TRUELOVE by David Whyte
so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
You may all marvel about the hero in you, and may this week be filled with lots of hugs and laughter and strong connections.
See you again.
- Anugrah
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write different series on Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone and love for life. My newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. You can know more about me here and here.
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Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with The Antidote for Self-Doubt, We Imagine Because We Are Living or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.