The Heliotropic Hypothesis

Most ubiquitous and iterative childhood dictates by the parents must be to see good in everyone. The gravity and quintessence of this thought seem to fade regressively with age, that too logarithmically than linearly. So the attitude toward others takes a U-turn from innocent till proven guilty to vice-versa – to the extent of proactively searching for ‘latent’ motives behind innocuous acts of others. Unfortunately it becomes a reflex reaction, conditioned so deep that it takes the shape of our second nature.

The jolt to awareness of the espousal of this attitude came for me while watching a very popular talk show. The guest on the show, an extremely stoic man, was sans any tone-modulation describing the chilling story of his wife suffering from a mental disease that forced her to kill five of their young children. The thought per se would send shivers down anyone’s spine, and hence aptly so the show host was expecting him to show some signs of anger, vindictiveness, raw grief or at least a flicker of hatred toward his wife, for which she kept needling him about his feelings. But to everyone’s surprise and the show-host’s frustration he kept his poise throughout the interview, and most importantly attributed the whole act to his wife’s illness and not to her intentions. The focus was tuned into how she needs medical help rather than a strict penalty by law. Focusing on the good in others cannot go higher and more honest than that.

David Cooperrider, an Organizational Behavior Guru has delineated a theory called “Appreciative Inquiry”, where the organizational change and improvement is perceived as a dream to be discovered and destined rather than a problem to be solved. Through his years’ of experience he has found that true betterment comes from enhancing the abundance of ‘good’ in organizations through honest appreciation of the same. This spirit of appreciation is built on the belief or what he coins as the ‘heliotropic hypothesis’ that all try to grow in the direction of light. On hearing it for the first time, the beauty of the term completely swept me off my feet. It is so true, all of us make conscious or subconscious attempt to grow toward light – this is our true being, the nature that we are born with. The idea is to try to focus on this beauty of others so that we encourage this growth toward light in all our interactions.

How often when we feel the other is failing miserably at a job the truth that surfaces points to a lack of fitment of the job with the person and not a lack of anything in the individual herself making her an absolute rock star in an alternate profession that matches her innate propensities. Similarly when we brand another under one of the many negative adjectives in our mental dictionary we discover that she has a quality that surpasses all our projections of her, and every time we ignore someone due to the inconspicuousness in her acts she does something so fabulous that it triggers a major change in the lives she touches – we all are naturally heliotropic.

This truth bestows a huge responsibility in all – a responsibility that implores us to see that true beauty in others because it’s through our seeing and spelling that this beauty expands multi-folds. As in reel-life when the ostensible semi-villain turns into a ‘good’ person when the hero saves his life in spite of all his ‘evil’ acts, in real-life too every interaction that is based on the hypothesis of focusing on that real pristine beauty in the other, in spite of our mental images in a way triggers the multiplication and growth of that beauty. It is thus necessary to proactively develop this focus because it has the domino effect of making the whole world gorgeous.

After each of my yoga classes my teacher guides us to take our hands to our hearts’ center and chant ‘Namaste’ which she exquisitely describes as ‘may the light in me see the light in you’.

May we all find that vision to see and encourage the light in each other.