"A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter's day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out , lose the advantage of commingling, and again begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of one and other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing."
I read this Arthur Schopenhauer fable on porcupines many years too late. Past a certain age one ceases to learn from fables instinctively. Learning turns more into an after the effect correlation of personal experience to wisdom such as this.
When I read Aesop's fables to J, I do not have to interpret for her or talk about lessons in morality. Like any other child, she absorbs on her own. Though the perfect age to learn through the telling of a fable, she is too young for this very valuable one about porcupines.
To tell her before she has been mauled by love even once would protect her from needless agony. Yet not having known that pain would leave her life's body rather light. Maybe for J when the time is right, a mother can quote E.E Cummings and hope she hurts just a little bit less for it.
"be of love(a little)
More careful
Than of everything"
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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