Skip to main content

Just Being

The loss of unstructured playtime for children is a real tragedy as this article notes. The problems persist long past childhood I think if the kid grew up with all of their time planned and accounted for with someone watching over. Comes a point when the child becomes an adult, they cross all the toll-gates that were defined for them since birth and come out the other end of college completely lost. No one has plan for them in the real-world. It is expected they will figure things out on their own. I can't count the number of kids I know who are now there on that other side after years of every minute of their life properly planned. 

They pick up whatever is in front of them and latch on to it without thinking too hard if this is the thing for them. I believe that ability to introspect is a function of having had plenty of time to let the mind idle growing up, doing things without any plan or structure for no specific outcome. Random thoughts and questions come to a child's mind during such free-flowing periods of time. Some they may resolve on their own - come to conclusions right or wrong. For others they may ask the trusted adults in their life for an answer or an opinion. 

I would have loved for J's childhood to have been far less structured than it was but there is a reality that goes with raising a kid alone - it forces structure, discipline and planning just to get the job done. I envied parents who were not compelled by their life circumstances as I was to structure their child's time. Interestingly enough, many of those parents did not take advantage of what they had whereas I tried to eke out something free-form time for J every chance I got.

I instilled into J early in life that anytime she had free time with nothing to do, she should think about what kinds of things make her happy, energized and excited. What can she do to help others in meaningful ways. What would she be eager to plunge into first thing in the morning and stay with tirelessly not noticing how much time had passed. The big secret to having a good life is when that passion is discovered and a person can make a living with or around it. She does not know the answer yet but I am happy to see her thinking and coming up with a lot of interesting ideas - some she will pursue no doubt, others will be noodled over and set aside or discarded. This was the best I was able to do in lieu of being able to give her the dream of lazy summers doing nothing useful - just being. 

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