The best time to quit is when you don’t want to,” said my uncle, the wise, many moons ago, but I remember the words as if they were spoken just yesterday. The philosophy was sound: For, as any karma warrior will tell you, if you leave unfinished business, you are only going to have to come back to it — in this life or the next or the one after; the problem, of course, being that no one knows when his or her business is truly over and it is time to move on…
Uncle, on the other hand, had made a valuable contribution to the discovery of that vital aha! moment. What his statement meant was obvious. Hit by a brick on the head, it would translate thus: “Don’t give up when you are down; win your battles first and leave when you are still on a high,” a mantra, no doubt, fed to battling armies as well since the very beginning of time (but, obviously, not to sundry senior politicians in the news these last few days). But then, what is corporate life but mini war?
Those were days much before theories of OB became pop reads. People, by and large, stuck with their employers, retired with pride and, generally, looked down on “drifters” and anyone “who couldn’t hold a job for long” with great and perhaps justified suspicion. And it was only a small group of B-school educated, travelled-abroad people like the uncle in question who were beginning to challenge this view of the world.
The statement had been made at a crucial juncture in uncle’s life — when he was giving up on a well-established corporate career to risk entrepreneurship. And it was made, at least partly, to reassure, his family, us. It certainly made a great impression on me — then a Reader’s Digest consuming, somewhat conflicted teenager. In the years that have followed, uncle has gone on to do exceptionally well in life. And I? Well, I have just been trying to follow that advice, but pretty unsuccessfully — until now.
The first time I quit, I remember, it was in the school marathon. And I quit because I wanted to; quite desperately, my lungs having given out long before the white chalk line came any closer. Needless to say, all honourable intentions of contributing to the House Sports Cup tally had fled long before that.
Like in sports, like in life: I haven’t had to quit what others find impossible quite simply because I am not a smoker. But I haven’t managed to quit either eating out (multiple times a week) or not losing my temper (multiple times a day) or not keeping the cupboard tidy or not waking up early enough to go for a jog, or reading a book (when, really, I should be reading out to my almost-five-year-old), bad habits all. What hasn’t quit me — even though I really wish it would — is the few (!) extra pounds gained, that quietly crept up with advancing work and mortality in what I find to be a neat inversion of uncle’s primary principle.
At work, I have quit many times before but, regardless of how the goodbyes were worded (unmindful of uncle’s dictum), only because I wanted to: In one instance I wanted to not have to go through the ordeal of covering yet another fashion week, and in another, because all other wiends (work-friends) were likewise inclined! If you think that’s frivolous, come on, do a serious rethink: Do you suppose human beings to be creatures of strict logic and rationale?
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Finally, to come to the point: This is the first time I’ll quit when I don’t want to. But it’s time to test some theories. Uncle, let this one be on you! n