Now that some time has passed, most of us have moved on from the traumatic loss India suffered in the World Cup final. It was hard to take that loss doubly because of the way we had played till the final. Not only were we unbeaten but had dominated all the matches. My own dejection led me to think about the dejection felt by the players themselves. The golden generation of Kohli, Rohit, Ashwin and Shami, to name a few, who will not get another chance to redeem themselves. India threw their greatest ODI side ever at Australia in Ahmedabad. Just as Pakistan had thrown their greatest ODI side ever at Australia at Lord’s in 1999. Just as Sri Lanka had thrown their greatest ODI side ever at Australia at Bridgetown in 2007. Just as New Zealand had thrown their greatest ODI side ever at Australia in 2015.You can also add the ODI side of India at 2003 world Cup too to this list. What have we learnt happens when you throw your greatest ever side, at Australians in a World Cup final? They, inevitably loose.

What is it that brings the best out of Australia in crunch games? It is said that cricket is a game of multiple deliveries, and each delivery is agnostic of the event within which the contest between bat and ball occurs. It is said that cricket is set up for batters and bowlers to treat each ball as isolated occurrences, which keeps them in the moment, executing their skills unaffected by context or situation. In other words, every ball starts as being equal in cricket, and can be treated as an isolated event unaffected by what has happened the balls before. Somebody like Sehwag was famous for playing each ball as a separate event unaffected by what had happened before.

However, the hypothesis that every ball is equal in cricket fails to take into account one of the most fundamental aspects of execution of a skill: emotions, or control over them. Decision-making in sport or for that matter in life, is not based on algorithms; instead, state of mind matters – the ability to summon calmness, to control the nerves, which have a real physical impact on people. Confidence is part of the trick, but there is no magic potion for it. Most players at international level can play a great stroke or bowl a great ball, but what separates great players from the rest is that they can do it more often. It starts with skill, but it is perfected with practice and becomes a habit. Winning is a habit: it builds belief and confidence, and it removes doubt. This is what explains Australia’s winning crunch matches more often than not.

What about the losing teams? Pondering over the past only leads to regret and what ifs. There are great players in all those sides which will never have the distinction of being World Cup winners. These sides never recovered to their previous greatness, many became shadows of their former selves-remember India of 2007 or Pakistan of 2003 or even SriLankan since 2007. So is our own Cricket team in decline or will they shrug it off like the 2015 New Zealand team did?

When you are so near yet so far despondency sets in. Many of the players lose faith in their abilities, individually and collectively. Even great teams disintegrate and become pale shadows of their former selves. I have seen this happen not only on the sports field but in the world around me. In the corporate world things can be especially cruel. We have senior persons all around us who were high performers aspiring to be the sole leaders of their organization, but one mistake or sometimes even without any mistake, the world passes them by. Somebody else takes over and they have to bring themselves to perform under different circumstances.

That got me thinking about how life is like a journey, and we are all headed somewhere at every point in time. Several buses, different bus stops, different bus routes. The journey starts the moment you are born and ends the moment you leave this world. At some point, whether you realise it or not, you get off at a bus stop and take another bus to connect you with your next destination. If you are a careful traveler, you’d most likely have planned your journey, so you know exactly where to disembark and take another bus to continue your journey to your next destination. If not, your guess is as good as mine. However, sometimes no matter how well we plan our journey, life happens. We could have estimated how long it would take to arrive at our destination and then, life happens. The bus is delayed for whatever reason we cannot control or perhaps we experience something that makes us alter our well laid out plans.

Now I’m sure you are wondering “What bus is he talking about? What journey? What bus stops?” We all have expectations for our lives and different definitions of success: where we want to be, what we want to achieve. Each of us have our own success measures. We constantly think about how far or close we are to our dreams. Are you where you expect to be? or where you’d planned to be? Does it seem like the whole world has left you behind? Do you feel like you are at the bottom of the rung in terms of life success? Do you feel like you are on the wrong bus?

The Taste of Regret Has Hundreds of Flavors, none of them are good. It hurts. That job you didn’t get; that girl you didn’t impress, that promotion you missed. That dear friend you parted ways with; the girl you loved; the exam you worked so hard for; that university you desperately wanted admission in – life is not kind enough to give us all we want, but it is cruel enough to take away from us what the heart desires the most. There are probably more missed opportunities in our life than the ones we took, and we constantly find ourselves regretting the things we lost.

Even in small doses, reliving the past, by definition, robs you of the present. Every second spent on what happened comes at the cost of what is happening.

In larger doses, regret can be psychologically paralyzing. We get so caught up in what could have or should have happened, we spend days, weeks, even months, wallowing in the past and get so caught up in missed opportunity.

You take a look at the people around you and wonder why everyone seems to have experienced winning moments this year, but you’ve barely scratched the surface. You remember all of the hurdles and challenges you faced as you also recall how everything seemed like a breeze for someone else. Do they have two heads? What did they do that you didn’t do? Those are just some of the questions you ask yourself as you’re tempted to feel like you’ve failed. You saw the bus at the bus station but every time you ran towards it, you always seemed to be late. You probably feel like you’ve spent more time waiting for the bus than you have spent on the actual bus. And when you did get on the bus, it seemed like the journey would go on and on without ending.

Sometimes when we feel this way, it is usually because we compare ourselves with people we know or other people who have “arrived”. We see the people we consider our peers, and we believe we have not achieved significant success. However, it’s pertinent to understand that we all have different assignments on earth and to fulfil our assignments, we must have specific personal experiences. Any wonder why the path you have taken in life is different from anyone else’s? You sit and wonder… why does “A” have everything going well for herself, and I can barely keep my head up. How come “B” has got the perfect job when I even had better grades than he did? I must be a failure because “C” has everything made and I can barely survive.

Some of us tend to think “I could have been a success, but I never had the opportunity. I wasn’t born into the right family, or I didn’t have the money to go to the best school”. But when we measure success by the extent, we are using what we’ve received, it eliminates that frustration.

Thinking this way will never help as we are measuring ourselves against other people’s yardsticks. Of course, we will come up short, we didn’t set the standard. We need to constantly keep our eyes on our plans and not focus on others, using them as our measure of personal success. Yes, we are all on a journey, but we are in different buses heading to different locations, nothing says that we all have to arrive at the same time.

Unfortunately, you cannot change the past nor turn back the hands of time, but you can surely change your present situation and make way for a brighter future. Moving forward, one can decide to be more proactive in taking advantage of the resources and opportunities and not let FEAR keep one from following one’s dreams.

We should reflect on the time gone by. What worked? What didn’t work? Why? Take a step back and appraise your performance against the goals and plans you, set. Find your destination, alight at the relevant bus stops, and fight the temptation to get down at someone else’s stop. Don’t compete with others in the journey of life, understand what you have to do on earth and then compete with yourself. Life is lived only once, don’t live in someone else’s script.

Failure is a part of life, and we must accept it. It is real, and it hurts. It also cuts deep and can separate those who go on to achieve success and those who give up and turn back on their goals. In many ways, I believe failure can be the opportunity to grow and attain a deeper understanding of life. We all fail from time to time, but that doesn’t make us failures. What’s worse than failure is not having tried at all! Our happiness depends on our ability to move on from our sense of failure, with our well-being intact. This is the way I see things today.

I’m reminded of a particular short story in Alan Lightman’s, Einstein’s Dreams. In the story author envisions a world without memories. When the day is over, their memory is gone, and the day starts anew. So, everyone carries around a diary called “Book of life”, instead of memories. With time, each person’s Book of Life thickens until it cannot be read in its entirety. They are then faced with a choice: elderly men and women may read the early pages, to know themselves as youths; or they may read the end, to know themselves in later years. Those who chose not to read it at all were the happiest. To them it did not matter whether they were rich or poor, whether they loved or were empty-hearted. Such people looked you directly in the eye and griped your hand firmly. Such people walked with the limber stride of their youth. For they had abounded their past and lived without memories or regrets.

Since we can’t live in a world with no memory, we must settle for living in the present, without regrets.

To paraphrase the words of Clint Eastwood’s Blondie character in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, “There are two kinds of people in this world — those who make it, and those who don’t.” It is up to us and the Indian cricket team what kind we/they want to be.