California Girl: Learning to be Humble

Humility is one of those concepts that goes with the core values of niceness, kindness, personal decency, civility, and respect; values which are shared by ordinary people in cultures all over the world. It entails having the strength of character to submit to the underlying yin of existence that forms part of our soul and the universal spirit.

The Oxford English dictionary defines humility as “having a modest or low view of one’s importance.” It is the antithesis of arrogance, meanness, and the inability to realize that each of us humans living on planet earth is just a speck of reality in the cosmos of the universal spirit.

The Story

I started thinking again of these concepts, a few weeks ago, when some friends informed me that a company I once did business with had summarily dismissed a lady, who I will call California Girl.

California Girl hailed, as you guess it, from California! She had arrived on the East Coast after a number of years studying and working in the West Coast. She was a very talented woman, who had been part of the original team who had created and set up the technological and organizational infrastructure of that company.

The company for many years thrived, and achieved success in terms of meeting its objectives and goals and won awards which reflected well on its self and the wider conglomerate to which it belonged.

However, there was a dark and sinister side to the success, award winning, and outward positivity that senior managers exuded to the outside world.

California Girl was the Chief Design Officer responsible for managing the architects and designers of the products developed by this company. California Girl wielded enormous power and sway. She was a technologist at heart although she also had a good eye for design and core inner structures of a product.

However, this talent together with the success that the company achieved somehow also brought out the dark side of California Girl. In her interactions with architects, she was particularly rude, terse, and insolent in her communications. She seemed to dislike direct interactions with people. She issued most of her edicts, thoughts, and feedback on products via email sometimes using the most virulent language. She was not averse to issuing formal reprimands to staff, or even firing staff due to refractions that were the result of dysfunctional and unfair work practices.

Numerous talented architects had left the company over the years. Turnover was very high close to 95 percent every couple of years. Complaints were made to the Human Resources department and others in the higher echelons of the conglomerate for years but nothing seemed to happen. I used to be especially sorry for all those architects who had uprooted their families from all over the US to pursue what they considered an excellent opportunity only to find out that it wasn’t.

California Girl however, seemed to always come away unscathed because the company was meeting the objectives and goals that had been set for it.

This state of affairs at this company carried on for a period of over six years with California Girl becoming more strident and arrogant with a misplaced sense of confidence and importance in her abilities and persona.

To cut a long story short, the complaints and stories of the conditions and high turnover in the company started to catch the attention of the founders. And one day, she overstepped the marked, by making derogatory comments about a contractor, again via email. In sum, she was called in, and instantly fired.

California Girl had come to believe in her own self-importance and her ability to do no wrong. And this was her final undoing.

Reflections

At one level, many of us who had done business with California Girl expressed satisfaction at what had happened to her. The thinking being—she got what she deserved—after all that others had experienced.

At another level, I had some sympathy for California Girl. She was the sole breadwinner of her family. Her husband was not working—at least the work he did was at best ad hoc. She also had children in private school whom she deeply cared for. So, I had concern for the effect that would have on them.

However, at a yet deeper level, I realize that California Girl losing her job might actually be a good thing for her. I always used to feel that at some level she was trapped. Other friends used to mention the same thing. She seemed to have a number of underlying issues that despite the veneer of smiles manifest in unhappiness for her.

I used to feel she was trapped in a marriage to a husband whom she has had to support for many years, and by the fact that the burden of caring for the family seemed to rest unfairly perhaps on her shoulders. Her children were at a point in their schooling where it would not be wise to move them around. In addition, they were in private schools, for which she had to pay.

This unhappiness that California Girl felt, would, on occasion emerge in meetings where she would wistfully talk about other contemporaries who had gone on to create successful companies in the West Coast.

So, at this level, she felt powerless and trapped, succumbing to a role that society with all its unfairness to women had bestowed on her. And, the only way she felt she could express her unfulfilled holy intentions was by being a tyrannical manager.

The Solution

Perhaps, now she would have the opportunity to think about her own needs. What she really wanted for her self, rather than what society says she should be doing. Perhaps, this would be a good opportunity for her to have a long talk with her husband and family about this.

Perhaps also, she would reflect on the hurt she caused many many people and seek some kind of atonement for her acts as part of her process of healing, redemption, and reconnection to her true self.

We are all given multiple opportunities in life to redress past failings. And we all have these failings. If California Girl is not sufficiently sensitized by this happenstance to reassess and redress the failings in her life, further opportunities will no doubt keep appearing every now and again till she does.

Nonetheless, whether this happens, this story can serve as a reminder to all of us.

We are all mortal beings. Not one of us is indispensable to the functioning of society and Mother Earth. We all have our parts to play but those parts are very small—very small indeed. And we are indeed replaceable. The universe will not stop to exist if you die. It has existed for an eternity before you arrived. When you think of your role in these terms, and also in terms that planet earth is also just a speck in the universe, which is also part of a larger ecosystem, you start to get the picture. Thinking this way is a good way of making sure that you inhabit humility of spirit.

So, be humble, be kind, and try to embody an empathy and warmth for others, as we are all brothers and sisters—in the universal scheme of things.