Skills

Skills are not only instrumental in earning a livelihood but they are essentially survival and defence mechanisms as well. Some skills are acquired some one is born with.

Skills are honed through professional training and also by means of deep meditative contemplation. Skills manifest one’s creative power and proficiency, mental inclination and aptitude and intellectual strength and acumen. The finer the skills higher is the person’s place in society. Skills, therefore, ensure security, income and status.

Here we assume that the avenues required to refine and showcase one’s skills are readily, constantly and consistently available.

While the word skill usually directs our minds to physical manifests in achieving outcomes of greater and finer standards there are certain inward skills which enable us to traverse life more effectively and efficiently.

The ability to surmount obstacles, the courage to face adversity with equanimity, being stoic in a state of unbridled joy and/or in depths of abject misery are also skills which shine through human personality. Unshaken conviction, an undaunted spirit, power of love, art of giving and being the receptacle of divine consciousness are also skills chiseled in the most prestigious institution called the journey of life. These are super skills which facilitate acquisition and nurturing of other skills.

Skill is growth. Skill is competence. Skill is enhancement. And life is the most dynamic centre of education which at every bend, at every turn, at every cross road upskills. It teaches one adaptability, flexibility and openness to adopt and apply new approaches to new and unforeseen scenarios which no school or college syllabi include.

The knack of getting up dusting your pants after every stumble, after every scramble, after every crawl and after every bungle is the skill of all skills that one is in continuum to grasp, fail and grasp again. The process is lifelong – a learning without a punctuation !!

It is this skill that I am still figuring out – fathoming , navigating, getting confounded, shaking my head in utter bafflement and then limping on. How could I …? How could I not…? Are perennial themes pirrouetting in my mindscape.

It is said one learns till one’s last breath. I too am getting renewed in skills, reformed and rejuvenated on a rough, rugged and undulating path. The rosiest speck on the horizon is that there is no stopping yet.