You are almost there!

There is nothing to fear from these four words. I go with the premise that everybody is working on something or the other and has certain goals in mind. It is so encouraging if a soothsayer pops up and announces: ‘You are almost there!’ This actually is what everyone wants to read every time one glances at what the stars try to foretell or even when one clicks on the ‘daily fortune cookie’ on facebook!

Yes, most of us like to feel that we’re almost there. Though it isn’t always about jobs or college admissions or competitions or completions or winning… there are more sombre shades too!

Even Shane Warne was almost there before Liz discovered his obvious penchant for laying text carpets for Adele Angeleri! Lalit Modi was almost there before a single tweet did him in. Raja was almost there but the Radia tapes held him back! From Raju of Satyam to Lewinsky’s Clinton, from Manoj Tiwari in Bigg Boss to Gabbar in Sholay, from Lalu of Bihar to Pak forces in 1965… the almost there saga contains in it enough heart-breaks and yet holds the world spellbound!

Yet I insist that ‘you’re almost there’ is NOT about failure to reach. It is actually about success. Excellence is never about what has been missed, but always about what has been gained… from material wealth to spiritual awareness, from sublimation of guilt to being finally left free to ponder on everything else that life offers, from realization of one’s strengths to pausing to plan better… truth is that almost all of us are always almost there every moment of out lives. And most of the time we need the reassurance of being ‘almost there’ form anyone or anything that is credible enough. It could be Bejan Daruwala in his weekly column, Poonam Sethi fiddling with her tarot cards, any of the numerous online ‘mind readers’, or even friends pretending to be expert palm readers!

There is music in ‘you are almost there’…as this song by Alicia Keys suggests:

Three, four!
Yeah
You know, we’re so close
See, I can taste it
I know all our dreams
We can taste it
We almost there

Come on, say!
Uh! Yeah!
Come on, say!
Uh! Yeah!
Three, four!

Just one more step
Come on, baby, yeah
‘Cus we’re al-, almost there, uhuh

No matter how hard
The task may seem
Don’t give up our plans
Don’t give up our dreams
No broken bridges
Will turn us around
‘Cus what we’re searching for
Will soon be found

‘Cus we’re al-, almost there
Just one more step
Just one more step, uh
Don’t give up!
We’re al-, almost there

Look at the lonely lovers
That didn’t make it
Love’s long hard climb
They just couldn’t take it
Don’t let it happen
To me and you
Just hold togehter, darling
We’ll make it through

Darling, keep on reaching out for me

[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/almost-there-lyrics-alicia-keys.html ]

Though beware, the online world (the offline world too is full of them) is always ready to suck the gullible in!

These four words are the most often used on the internet. Every other day i get an email that starts with these words and then goes on to cajole me into just clicking and reaching out to whichever world they’re selling! Even websites have landing pages devoted to these four words that follow it up with calling you smart for having reached so far and suggest that just one more click is needed before… you reach wherever they want you to reach (but obviously, many of us aren’t aware of that and get baited willingly!).

These four words have an uncanny power over logic. Every time I read or hear these four words, I ask myself these questions:

1. Am I near… so near… that I cannot afford to quit now?

2. Is someone trying to flatter, cajole, or fool me into an action that I don’t really want to take?

3. Do I really need to quantify how near I am to where I want to get?

4. What if I am not there after all… would I dust the failure off and begin again?

The answers invariably lead me on to an option that I inevitably choose and move on. Most of the time if you are really involved in a task these questions just happen somewhere in the subliminal ranges of the mind and we keep getting ‘intuitively guided’…

But thats not the end. I stumbled upon an interesting query and an equally fascinating answer on the internet. (http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/765592) Someone asked: “Installing Firefox on netbook starts saying ‘you are almost there’ doesn’t go away after installing 3.6.12?” The answer: “I installed Firefox on my hp 2133 netbook and after installation the words ‘you are almost there’ starts up. If I ‘X’ it out, I can get into Firefox, and everything works fine.”

Thus, it isn’t having failed or succeeded that is important… what is important is to move on. The secret mantra is: ‘X’ out the success or failure of the moment past and get into the present… and everything works fine!

© Arvind Passey
20 December 2010