Skip to main content

Two Piles

N is a few years older than me but has the spirit of a much younger person. She is still up for a lot of adventure and exploration, excited about things many of our peers stopped caring about long ago. Spending any amount of chatting with her is rejuvenating for me. It forces me tap back into my twenty year old soul and believe in miracles again. While life does not unfold in a series of miracles, just being able to get into that state seems to have benefits. Most recently, after we went over the shenanigans in her current relationship combined with her son getting serious about a woman she thinks is entirely unsuitable for him, I felt like a reset button went off for me somewhere inside. 

This conversation forced me to take stock of what I can at the moment change and not change in my life. There is a good bit of undesirable stuff in the cannot change pile. Borrowing a leaf from N's book, I decided to separate myself mentally from that pile in entirety and allow time to resolve things organically. By not participating, I don't have to feel drained and defeated. The pile is already looking smaller and has receded to some distance in my mind. The things I can change are looking so much more interesting in contrast and I want to stay focused on those. I will never become one like N but it is a great blessing to have a force of nature like that in one's life. 

Comments

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...

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...