Skip to main content

Prescience And Hindsight


I was meeting my friend E after a very long time. Since she had relocated, our contact has been limited to occasional phone calls and even fewer emails. So when she happened to be in my neck of the woods on business, we were excited to catch-up. In a segue from my comment about lack of reliable music reviews and my growing unfamiliarity with the scene, E went on to music from the 70s. That in turn brought back memories of her teens, having sex for the first time and such.

By her own admission, E has had a rich and varied love life - something she has mentioned to me earlier with more regret than pride - or that is how it seemed to me. That evening she said something I had not heard before "I suffered from low self-esteem and insecurity well into by 20s and 30s. The only way I knew to feel good about myself was to be wild and free. I needed men to tell me how beautiful I was, how much they desired me so I could feel I had some value. Nothing else did it for me. I was willing to do anything to have them say that"

In her late thirties, E seemed to have an epiphany about her motivations and began to understand why she had been through so many short-lived relationships - the sex was always great but emotionally she felt more and more depleted. She started to feel like she was giving herself away without receiving anything tangible in return. It was her moment of truth and her lifestyle started to change dramatically from that point on.

I know a few women of E's age and have heard them say very similar things about how they had been in their youth what motivated their behavior when it came to relationships. Similarly, I know women younger than me walking in the footsteps of E's generation, repeating their "mistakes" all over again. Yet there is a certain profoundness in learning life lessons the hard way which simply cannot be compared to the life experience of someone who is merely following their convictions without putting their value system to test.

E and others like her have often told me that I am wise beyond my years given my views on relationships and my life will end up being better and happier (not to mention infinitely less complicated) than their as a result of it. As gratifying as that is for me to hear, I don't imagine for a minute that I will have ever the same perspective as they do. In the end, it does not matter if our actions are guided by prescience or hindsight, we still win some and lose some.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
"learning life lessons the hard way" sounds very romantic but sometimes it is too late. You have already missed a bus and many a times it is not possible to recover. It was happened to me in professional life and this happened in spite of continued warning from professors in my first year of undergraduate. Your career path can take a different trajectory and so can your personal life.
7:59 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more