Most people will advise you to look ahead in life.

Look in front.

Look straight.

Don’t look back.

After hearing those lines or some other forms of those lines for a “many many” times in much different voice, we have become very good at the art of looking ahead in everything in life.

Let us take the obvious scenario. Consider you got 85.91 in a very important exam. Now, don’t look too much into it. For some of you, 85.91 is a breeze. For some of you, 85.91 is hard earned. And for some of you, 85.91 is the result of some quick thinking and some super quick looking during the exam.

Most of the time, 85.91 is just a number. One among infinite others. But once 85.91 is written down on a paper with your name/ symbol number on it, 85.91 becomes a very significant number. And that number is significant only to you.

From there onwards, you shall check the highest marks. It's 94.12. You lacked approx. 9 marks to 94.12. And that’s that. You know that 12 people in the class have failed. They didn’t even cross the passing mark. You know that there are people behind you. People who got less than 85.91 and people who get very less than 85.19. But there are also people who got 85.97 and 86. And yes, there is also that person who got 94.12.

In that situation what are we to do but follow the advice given to us by many of those who were given the same advice themselves. When we do not know what to say, we say the lines that have been said to us repeatedly. When we do not know what to do, we do what we have been told to do repeatedly. And in the case above, we look ahead of ourselves and feel sorry for the .78 and the 8.93 point difference between us and those ahead of us never minding the fact that 12 of our classmates failed.

This is just a scenario. We look at the riches of the rich. We look at the luxury palaces, yachts, and private islands. We have seen the slums and the barely standing houses. But we do not look at them again. We do not look at the poverty of the poor. We just look ahead.