Toastmaster's Advanced Speech 7 - "Live In The Moment"

This is speech #3 from  "Storytelling" manual, called "The Moral of the Story". The objectives are: to understand that a story can be entertaining yet display moral values, to create a new story that offers a lesson or moral, and to tell the story, using the skills developed in the previous two projects. Time allotted is 4 to 6 minutes.

Has any of you present here ever been stuck in a traffic jam? On the top of a flyover?

Good Afternoon fellow Toastmasters.

For those of you who are not from Indore, let me tell you there exists a world on the other side of Rajwada as well, and believe it or not, it is part of this city. Till about ten months ago, I used to be a resident of that world (and soon going to be, again..back to where I came from!). Now, driving from across that part, to the office, is no piece of cake. With people constantly celebrating festivals of religions you did not even know or recognize, organizing protests and human chains, bringing out wedding processions and what not on the already clogged roads, traffic jams are a common occurrence. Add to this our city folks’ amazing sense of driving, and you can get a jam for no apparent reason at all. Because, it seems there are only two rules of driving here, one – there are no rules; and two – but nobody really wants to get involved in an accident.

So imagine my surprise when one fine day I took my car and started from my home to the office, and the roads were clear! People were actually stopping at red signals and starting only when they turned green! If they had to turn right, they were in the right lane, not in the middle one! All bicycle, thela walahs, auto rickshaws were giving me space to pass through. I could not believe my luck and had just begun to thank the stars when halfway through the journey, from the top of the Shastri bridge - you know the one where we have a Mahatma Gandhi statue - far in the distance, I saw, horror of horrors, a traffic jam. Since I was at a height, I could see way too far in the distance; all vehicles were moving at a snail’s pace, a straight one way road had become a jigsaw puzzle.

My jubilant mood at once turned morose and instead of praising the stars, I started…well...cursing them.  Honestly, you cannot drive in this city without that. While descending the flyover, all sorts of thoughts crossed my mind…this is going to take me forever..will I ever reach the other side? There will be so much blaring of horns and heated up emotions, what if someone accidentally scratched my car? Why cant people simply move one after the other in a civilized way and get rid of this nuisance. This is too much…there is no hope for this place…my day is ruined.

Going through such thoughts, I did not realize that I had come down the bridge and was in the middle of what seemed to be a nightmare from the top. The snails I had seen moving from far beyond, weren’t actually snails…it was a decent enough speed at which they were running. Sure, it could be better, but it wasn’t that bad either. The street wasn’t even so much clogged as it had appeared to me before. My favorite rock CD was playing on the music system and I was actually enjoying the sluggish ride. In fact, now I was calculating how many songs would play before I reached my destination and deep in my heart hoping that the drive took more time.

Friends, what I really want to tell you via this story is that, when we look way too far ahead in the future, sometimes things looked clogged up, nightmarish even, because we are seeing through a bird-eye view. But when we are actually living the moment, we discover that it’s not too bad (especially if good old rock music is playing in the background). So why not avoid looking at things we don’t understand, things that have not taken shape yet, and things that ruin your present and make you worry unnecessarily? Why not live in the moment?

This speech took 6:40 minutes to deliver and was appreciated for variations in pitch and volume while narrating and that the moral of the story came out from simple day to day activities. There could have been more surprise elements in the story.