Skip to main content

Starting Well

I saw a young woman not much older than J enter a nice apartment building with her poodle on a rainy evening while on my way back to the hotel. The rain was spent by then and only a mild spray remained but the dog was a bit drenched and so was the woman. They were coming back from her dog-friendly place of work most likely. 

The scene brought to mind the question of effort, quality of life and desire for more. By most standards, this young person was doing very well for herself barely out of college. Back from work at a very reasonable hour, accompanied by her dog and living in an upscale neighborhood. If a person has attained all that already then would they care to take on risk and discomfort to try things that are better long term but come with a lot of short term pain.

 If this is the only work life a person has known since college and continues to for several years after, it may impair their ability to accept other harsher realities. Maybe there is no harm in that - to land into comfort early in life and just keep it that way. The last part though is fraught with peril - this is not an easy thing to keep as years go by. Comfortable jobs tend not to be challenging either and make you irrelevant in the broader market very quickly. 

My first job out of college was the epitome of comfortable - well paid, low to no stress and a very short walk from my apartment in a safe neighborhood. I was surrounded by families with young kids and there were also singles like me.  - there was plenty of company after work so I did not have to go further to have a social life. It took me about two years to overcome the inertia that this combination of comfortable things produced and get out to the real world. 

I started to learn things that would make and keep me professionally viable only after I left that job and city. Had it not been for the ambitious peer group I had started with (who all left the place within a year), I don't think I would have summoned up the energy to get out myself. I was infact the last person from that group to leave and it may well have been my last chance to get out. 

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

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 ...
25 comments
Read more