The battle between the flexible thumb and a strong will

The husband, a palmist by pure interest took a look at his wife’s firm thumb and declared: you are stubborn. Comparing it with his own supple thumb, he categorized himself as being eminently flexible and thus took the credit for even the success of the marriage.
He went a step further… It is because you are so stubborn that you have so few friends… Look at me. And your daughter. We have so many friends, simply because we are not as stubborn as you. The one friend you have must be having a thumb which indicates that she is very flexible that is why……

The presence of the daughter prevented her from telling him to go take a hike.
It was not that that the prediction was the dictum of the Gods, though at that particular moment it hurt. It hurt to know that he would make such declarations without giving a thought to the making of the person.

Twenty years of togetherness may have instilled some ability to sense that all is suddenly not well. He tried to mend the damage, maybe sensing the undercurrents of the hurt, as she continued reading her book. Sensing her withdrawal, he commented again, addressing his daughter: maybe that is why she is so persevering, has such a strong will power compared to you and me. (I think he initially meant being strong-willed, when he said ‘stubborn’)

She could see no connection between being stubborn and having a strong will, though she was too tired to analyse, explain or even defend her personality traits! The child went to sleep. So did she. But somewhere the hurt filtered into her dreams, and she had a fitful night’s of rest.

Come next morning, and glancing through the paper, she happened to look at a column which spoke of enduring friendships. Relationships built during college days, during one’s career, and then finally about broken relationships which are not worth the sorrow it brings, because they do not justify the beauty of the relationship.

It set her thinking again. Were relationships lost in her life because she had been stubborn? She could not think of a single person whom she had dropped on the way, simply because of her inflexible thumb! On the other hand, the few people she had in her life, were there to catch her whenever she fell. How many people do you need to support you when you stumble? If the pair of hands is strong enough, just one will do.

I think we have very different measures to judge people’s emotional successes.
If you are able to spend the whole day simply clicking away at a mobile phone with that flexible thumb, sending messages to your countless ‘friends’, you take credit for the success of the relationship. Because the longer the list of people you have in your life, the better you are as a person! Thus spake one wise man, for whom there was apparently success in numbers!






Yes, this lady has very few people in her life… because she did not believe in excess baggage. She does not believe in superficial relationships. People feel threatened when they interact with her: threatened by her firm thinking, her clear thoughts and expression, and her persona of assertiveness (which people, for lack of a command of the language, and ignorant of the nuances term it aggressiveness).

But they also reach out to her when there is a crisis, when things were to be just done, no matter what the consequences, when they were like a lost herd of sheep… And just because she was the kind, who pitched in and just went about getting things done, she never attached any value to such actions of hers…. It was not done because she wanted accolades, or appreciation. As a part of society, as a weave in a large pattern of life, she did her share. This no-nonsense attitude of hers unnerved some people- simply because she had no time for soft-pedalling. Was it stubbornness I wonder, or just a strong-will?

This very lady stood like a rock beside her husband when he underwent terrible personal and professional tragedy…. drawing on this very quality of ‘stubbornness’ in her, which I choose to call a strength of the mind and an indomitable spirit. A strength which refused, and still refuses to buckle under pressure. She has sifted the chaff from the grain in her life, and she is happy with the ‘few meaningful relationships she has’ rather than collecting a crowd like a politician who has lorryloads of paid people coming to listen to his speech. She has company in other forms: in the form of books, music, the flora and the fauna, in her very own private thoughts and in forms which people who are flexible may never understand!!!