Skip to main content

Close Yet Far

Slate has this series of pictures themed "Bored Couples" which brings to mind people I have seen myself likewise uninterested in their moment together, like "two hearts living in two separate worlds" to borrow from Elton John. They have made me wonder if they had always been this bored with each other or if their relationship lost its spark from long years neglect and nonchalance.

You want to believe there was a point in time when there was brio and zest about them, that if they were to undo the series of events leading up to the present moment and do things right this time, they would be a couple that exuded an aura of happiness about them.

The common thread through this entire series is how evident it is that the two are far apart in spirit while in physical proximity. It proves some things I have always held true about relationships. It is not how much time you spend together that counts or matters, it is how close you feel when you are far apart. It is not how scintillating your conversations can be but how you can sit across from each other silently savoring the other's presence. It is not what you do together but how much you think about the other when you are each doing your own thing. It is not how long you have known each other but how intensely you have lived and felt your togetherness.

Finally, in any picture of the two of you the spark would be unmistakable.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...