Skip to main content

Finding Bliss

A few days ago J was texting me quite excited to share news of a kid she had re-connected with after a long hiatus. Little S as I remember her was one of the girls from J's dance class. She was a couple of years younger and we typically met at once J's class ended and hers began. The mother was intensely focused on S's education and all around development. At the time S played four sports, took dance lessons, studied art and robotics outside of school. While all time was structured time but S was a free spirit in a quiet sort of way. J was excited to report that S had reached out to let her know she is off to college soon and will be following her dream - she was going to study art and art history. S maintains a great blog on art - her own art portfolio is impressive and so are her ruminations about her favorite pieces of art from visits to various museums. S's love for the subject shines brightly - her blog is the place she is most herself, quite unlike that harried kid I once knew her to be. 

J was happy for her - for being able to keep her real passion alive despite the over-scheduled, over-committed, over-extended life her well-meaning parents created for her. She pushed through all that noise to nurture what made her happy. Not every kid has the inner-strength to swim against the tide of parental good intentions to connect with their personal source of bliss. Like J, I am glad that Little S did. She was a wonderful dancer too. Maybe in time, those other things she spent years working on thanks to the opportunities her parents gave her, will find a meaningful way to enrich and complete her life. I do believe this story will have a happy ending for all concerned. 

Labels:

Comments

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