Skip to main content

Missing Breeze

This article reads like a cautionary tale - the name of this one is Valley Fever but there are similar stories around the world. The climate of a place changes too much too soon or both and unforeseen consequences follow for every living creature of which humans are one. In my neck of the woods it seems like the air has become stiller over the years - not sure if I am imagining this but there is no breeze most of time. There is random rain and some gusts of wind but a gentle breeze has become a rarity, There is a general feeling of stuffiness all the time that will not let up. It is like the atmosphere is pregnant with things waiting to happen - things we will know nothing about until they are revealed. 

Maybe we are experiencing a wind pattern change here and it impacts how a person feels physically and mentally. This level of stillness is usually associated with a lull before a storm - you anticipate the storm, it duly comes, might blow over without much harm done and everything begins to flow again as always. That flow seems to have disappeared so you wait and wait for a storm that does not come but the foreboding must come with the territory and stay even if at a subliminal level. And this is nothing compared to the level of calamities in other parts of the world. A missing breeze would be a laughably stupid problem to discuss.

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...