The Tragedy of Phillip Hughes

The cricketer died doing something he loved
by Rashi Kakkar

 From the minute you are born, uncertainty kicks in. No one can definitely point out the trajectory your life will take. The only thing that someone can point out with certainty is that one day you will cease to exist, you will die. And death can come in many forms. A disease can eat you from within, an enemy bullet can consume you from outside, nature could crush you or lady luck could momentarily desert you and leave you vulnerable.
Irrespective of the way death decides to embrace you, it is often tragic. 

But sometimes you are better prepared for that meeting. A critical disease or war prepares you to the thought that your hours on Earth are limited. When death comes in any other form, it is so sudden that it leaves everyone else around you grappling with unanswered questions.

A smiling Phillip Hughes. Getty Images

The cricket world is currently in this state of shock. On 27 November it lost a son to a freak accident. The boy, Phillip Hughes, was just 25. He died three days before his 26th birthday. He died doing something he loved. He died with a cricket bat in his hand and dreams in his eyes. This story is so tragic that it causes heartache.

The tragedy is magnified when one considers the way he died. He died playing a sport. For most of us, we play sport to get away from the troubles of our everyday lives. Sport offers us an escape in the same way the movies do, or going to a music concert. We play sports because it is not a chore.

Of course, for Hughes, sport was also his livelihood. And it is ironic that the purpose of his existence became the reason for his death.

Hindu philosophy states that every human has a purpose and once he/she fulfills that purpose the soul vacates that body and goes to the next. Maybe that is how one can rationalize a young person’s death.

Life should after all be measured more by the impact you create rather than the time you spent on Earth. By this yardstick Hughes' 25 years have already surpassed many a life. Hughes is the youngest batsman (at 20 years and 98 days) to score hundreds in both innings of a Test match.

His tragic death should be a lesson to all that life is fickle. Be kind. Spread happiness. Live each moment with passion. Because unlike a game of cricket, death does not adhere to any rules or schedules.

Make Your Mistake a Mistake Plus

The English poet Alexander Pope wrote, ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine.’ This saying has now become a well-known proverb. It is a fact that everyone makes mistakes. This is part of human nature. But there are two kinds of mistakes. The first one is simply a mistake. There is another kind of mistake, that is, a ‘mistake plus’. The first kind of mistake fails to give you anything. But, a ‘mistake plus’ gives you many great things. A mistake plus seems to be a mistake in the beginning, but in the end it becomes an experience of gain.

 

When one makes a mistake, there are two possible kinds of responses. The first response is to become regretful. One who is full of regret will become disheartened after every mistake. He will be a victim of stress. It is also possible that he may lose courage and be unable to do anything else again.

 

This is the negative aspect of making a mistake. But there is also a positive aspect. That is, it encourages you to engage in introspection and self-reassessment. When you do this, your mistake will turn into a mistake plus. A mistake plus is bound to activate your mind. It will lead to brainstorming. In return, it will emerge as a natural gift for you. It will increase your creativity and produce a thinking process that may lead to the capacity for better re-appraisal of yourself and an increased ability to analyze things. A mistake becomes a mistake plus when it awakens your mind. It thus enables you to re-plan your life. A mistake plus makes a man a superman.

 

Nature’s greatest gift to man is his mind. The mind is the greatest miracle of nature. German psychologist Alfred Adler observed: “One of the wonder-filled characteristics of human beings is their power to turn a minus into plus.” Now there is the question of how this miracle may come about? The answer is that if a person makes a mistake and saves himself from being a victim of negative thinking, then by nature a miraculous event occurs. That is, by the law of nature a rethinking process is developed in him. He analyses what happened with him and tries to understand where he went wrong. He thinks how he may achieve at the second attempt what he could not at the first attempt. In this way a new process of positive thinking is initiated in the mind of this person, which becomes a means for his intellectual development. Thus, this process turns his mistake into a mistake plus.

 

A mistake is an error or fault resulting from poor judgement. If you think positive, your mistake will motivate you to try to find out where you went wrong. This kind of rethinking will open up new possibilities to you. Thus, in an indirect way, the mistake will become a means to climb to new heights of success in life.

 

The condition for turning a mistake into a mistake plus is that one should not take a mistake to be a full stop. Rather one should consider a mistake as a comma. If one makes a mistake ten times, one should put a comma at each instance. One should not put a full stop unless one’s mistake has turned into a mistake plus. 

 

Remember that in this world the quantum of mistakes is limited, but the quantum of achievements is unlimited. No mistake can close the door to your achievement, provided you are able to keep your thinking positive.