Skip to main content

Last Year

A few weeks ago, when J called me I asked her how her weekend was. She said it's around mid-night here on Saturday and I am talking you and we both laughed. My baby is a grown woman and we were chatting like friends. The year we all lived through has been awful by most counts and when we thought things could not get worse, they inevitably did. Fatigue is a common theme at home and burnout at work. There was more time and more aggravation to fill it when we were not despairing for loneliness and not having human contact for months on end. At the time of that call, J was waiting for some of her friends who had been contact traced to a kid who had covid, to come out of self-isolation. These had become the events to celebrate very far from the normal social rhythm of the college campus. 

Just being able to be together, knowing that no one was sick was a big deal, worth being excited about. It made me wonder if these friendships would run deeper and stronger than they otherwise would. Maybe that would be the big win for this generation of young people who transitioned into adulthood, independence and life away and apart from their parental homes in the midst of the pandemic. They might come out the other side having a tight-knit community of peers that have a keener appreciation for things that are no longer a given or taken for granted. Maybe the experience will set them up for greater happiness for the rest of their lives. Seen that way, 2020 may not have been such a horrible, terrible, no-good year after all. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
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

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...
Post a Comment
Read more