The Sum of All Forces - Lessons in Philosophy

Disclaimer - This blog post started out as an essay on corporate philosophy and why corporations need philosophies but somewhere along the way, it turned into an existentialist’s view of personal philosophy.

We hear it all the time. It’s all been done. All the good ideas are taken. The dice is loaded. The playing field is skewed. The opportunity cost is too high. Operational costs are rising. Margins are falling. Throughput is throttled. There is a bandwidth crunch. We say it to ourselves even though we know we can win. We say it even though we know it ain’t true. We say it, not because we believe it but because we’re afraid to take the leap, seize the day, take the metaphoric plunge into the proverbial deep-end. It hasn’t all been done. But the pieces are all there. Every task, every project, every action-item our our electronic to-do lists can basically be broken down into known, manageable entities. Joinable pieces. Conjunctionable verbs. So what life and work and work and life boils down to, is this giant systems-integration problem. How do we join the pieces? How do we connect the dots? How do we find the missing links? How do we fill in the blanks? It’s these hows that we basically have to answer when we are faced with challenges. So it must be a good thing that there are challenges that we have to face. For it is in the coming-to-grips with the challenges that we are able to define ourselves, define our identifies, define our character and define who we are and what we are capable of. It is in the course of the trek to the peaks of the mountain ranges in our heads that we find, in our minds, the valleys of faith, the orchards of truth, and the streams of clarity, of epiphany. It is in the sum of the forces that we fight. It is in the doing of what we know is right. It is in the heart as much as in the mind. If the heart’s in the right place, the mind will find sight.

- Arunabh Das

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