Skip to main content

Low Battery

My father is recovering from a sudden bout of illness that left feeling less confident about himself. That sudden loss of control followed by hospitalization for several days, no clear prognosis for why he experienced the symptoms he did. I imagine that coming to terms with his age and frailty is as hard for him as it is to me to accept that. When I left home he was still in his prime or it felt that way to me. He could do any amount of physical work, stay focused on a problem for hours and days. It was as if he was incapable for fatigue. Going back to my earliest memories of my father that is the mental image - he was a workhorse and he was not one to quit until the job was done. 

He is one of the most tenacious people I know and I feel a sense of pride when I see a bit of that grit in me. As that energy dims away, I feel like the source from what I have always drawn even without realizing it is ebbing away. Every time I call to check on him, I try to cycle some of that unstoppable energy back to him. I never had what he did but I learned to emulate well enough. It makes me happy to see some of that spark return even if for a short while. Like a worn out battery, it takes longer to charge and more frequent charges. Recently I have been thinking about when I will refer to him in the past tense and each time I pray that he has charge left in him to the very end to be loud, obstinate and unwilling to believe he can no longer do things. 

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