Skip to main content

Reading Quotes

Sometimes you come across a quote that seems like God was sending wisdom your way because how badly you need it. For me a few days ago it was “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting — Sun Tzu

While I am neither dealing with a specific enemy's resistance nor seeking to achieve supreme excellence, these are the words that I still needed to process. The equivalent of the enemy in my situation are a set of circumstances I have going on - some of my own choice and making, others not as much. Since they make me quite restless and uncomfortable, they could be construed as adversarial or inimical. 

My initial instinct is to run away from things that make me feel this way and when that is not an option the situation becomes hard to tolerate - much like if were an enemy putting up a strong resistance and thwarting my desired action. So there is the question of how to cope instead of what my natural tendencies dictate. That is where the idea of supreme excellence as an aspirational goal is very helpful. Reading this made me think of all the ways I could break down that resistance and it turns out that I can make some headway. It will not solve all issues but I would have still progressed towards excellence. 

The only other way I have come across random pieces of well-timed wisdom is by chatting with young kids whenever I meet them. It seems like they see more than they can explain, are wise in ways that we forget as we get older. Often they will say things that brings me a lot of clarity.

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