Skip to main content

Learning Patience

Talked to my childhood friend A after a long time today and much has transpired in his life. A month ago, he quit his job because he could not deal with the idea of having someone manage him anymore. This was a cushy job that required little effort after all these years and kept his dysfunctional marriage afloat. The wife was deeply disappointed with the decision and did not hesitate to demonstrate it.  A used this as a trigger to initiate parting ways with her peacefully, with minimal harm to their two kids. When we spoke, he sounded a couple of decades younger and happier than I have known him to be in his adult years. The chain of events triggered by the arrival of his new boss, turned out to be a big blessing in his life. A is now free to act in advisory capacity for the same clients he was serving while at the job. He gets to travel a lot more - something he had been looking forward to. The kids are old enough to manage on their own for the few days he will be gone. 

I have known A for as long as I remember and he was always a very patient and methodical person. Everyone who knows him values his counsel because he thinks through the consequences of actions very carefully. If you are planning to do something stupid, he will call you on it and explain his reasons. Some of us who were privy to his marriage troubles told him many times to put himself out of his misery but he always said the timing needed to be right and he would know when that is. We were not sure he would ever do it, maybe it was easier to preserve status-quo. He surprised us all and there is so much to learn from how A brought change in his life with minimal hurt and damage to those who were impacted by it. 

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...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...