Of Resilience, Faith, and Luck

Before you read any further, you should know - this post is not about hard product skills. It’s about how much of a role resilience, faith, and luck play towards the progressions in life, and hence by derivative applicable to professional and personal journeys.

My husband and I were overjoyed when we conceived our second child in Jan 2022. We dressed up our then 2-year-old in a “Sound The Alarm - I’m going to be a big brother” onesie, an ode to his love for fire trucks, and shared the news with equally excited grandparents. Unfortunately, our joys were short-lived when I miscarried a few weeks later. And just like that, our dreams were swept away, leaving us confused and dejected. But we brushed it off and tried again. And again. And again…and failed. Month after month. For years.

You see, unlike our professional and academic lives over the past 40 years, which have meticulously exemplified the Expectancy theory: Effort → Outcome…  for the first time in my life, no amount of effort was resulting in the outcome we so desperately wanted. 

So, we resorted to science. The doctors recommended IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), responsible for over 8 million babies worldwide. Conceptually, it’s quite straightforward… a woman's eggs and a man's sperm are retrieved and then combined in a laboratory to create an embryo that is transferred to the woman's uterus. What nobody tells you is the havoc the hormones wreck on the woman’s mental and physical state. 

Physically, you basically feel pregnant the entire time… nauseated, bloated, and fatigued. And then there’s the needles. Every night for weeks, each cycle. Ever so often, you unintentionally hit a capillary, and bleed through, only realizing so the next morning, accumulating piles of blood stained clothes. Mentally, the hormonal changes are doing a number on you. You are irrational and emotional and easily triggered. And since nobody tells you it’s the hormones, you wonder what’s wrong with you. And with a 20-35% success rate on the first attempt, you could be going through this ordeal for several months or years. 

You go through this while juggling a job and a family. Coworkers and bosses at the workplace don’t even know what you are going through, your toddler still demands your presence and patience, and friends and family either don't know (cause IVF isn't a table topic) or don't understand what it means or how to support you. And nobody, not even you, truly understands what you are going through. 

But you keep at it. Needles after needles. Pills after pills. And countless visits to the clinic for tests, pokes, and swabs. Because you believe. You keep the faith. You tell yourself … when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And you throw the Expectancy Theory out the window, and resort to Bhagwan Geeta’s कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन |मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि || 47

This translates to, “You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”In other words, put the work in, and don’t worry about the results. Keep the faith. Keep going—one step in front of the other. 

And then one day, you get lucky. And a year later, you are holding your rainbow baby in your arms, wondering what you did to deserve all the joy this little one brings to you. And you dust off the “I am going to be a big brother onesie”, you’ve been holding on to for years. And remember, it takes Resilience, Faith and Luck. 

Welcome to the world, Kabir.