A call and after....

It is amazing, the extent to which our minds can be conditioned over the years; conditioned to experiences, events, incidents and even words…. simple casually uttered words that have the power to evoke strong emotional responses and thoughts, based on preconceived ideas and previous experiences.
Incident…
There I was plodding my way through the day at work when I get a call from my son’s school, which was a first for me. I was asked to pick him up from school an hour after the regular school leaving time since “he has not completed his reading passage work”.
Instant reaction running through my mind -> All those complaints from teachers concerning his incomplete assignments and now he has taken it to this level of being punished with after school detention… grrrrr
Anger begins its infusion.
I leave work early to be able to reach on time to pick him up. I call my husband before starting the car, vent out a bit of my slowly building up anger and suggest that we block my son’s favourite WWE sports channel as punishment.
A 45 minute drive, hardly anything to look forward to, maneuvering through the already heavy early evening traffic, my anger builds up some more, all the time wondering what I am going to say to him. And worse, dreading the thought of meeting his teacher’s reprimanding words and expressions and my mind scolding my son even further for having put me in such a situation. My head begins to throb; my entire body feels like it is being weighed down with lead.
I park the car, enter the school and walk through the corridor towards the reception area and find his classmates standing there apparently waiting for their parents. A small voice in my head notes this with “okay, so he was not the only one to be punished” and my heart lightens just a little bit. My son comes walking quickly towards me bursting to tell me what really happened, the injustice of it all! A flurry of words through which he manages to convey that he had completed most of the homework with the exception of what he did not know requiring help from his teacher while majority of the class had not bothered to do the work at all, which angered the teacher to the extent that she proceeded to punish the entire class.
My son was not at fault…yippee!! My whole being softens and a feeling of sweet relief floods through me. I must remember to ask my husband to retain the WWE channel…my son must never know that I had even considered taking it off...
A single abrupt sentence over the telephone had managed to provoke a successive series of strong thoughts and emotions, and how!

Take on life

· Enjoy the here and now of each day. Try not to look back and cling to the past. Nostalgia is acceptable but not living in the past!
· Regard each day as the last day of your life and live it to the fullest. Make sure you are doing what you enjoy doing, with no reservations, inhibitions or regrets!
· Don’t put off what you want or need to do…procrastination may be thy name, but hey you might not have a tomorrow to procrastinate towards!
· Don’t wait for opportunities to come to you and don’t let go of them when they do reach you! Search, Grab, Experience and then take a Decision!
· Never lose touch with people who have touched your life in a positive way. Friends, family, acquaintances, mentors… Lose touch with them and you find that you gradually lose touch with yourself.
· Always take on as much as you can do. Added pressure might work as a positive stimulant under some circumstances, but if you feel overwhelmed and over-stressed by what lies ahead, it might be an indicator that you need to slow down or find alternatives to help you out.
· Always listen to people. Listen to what they say as well as to what they don’t. The latter might actually be more significant!
· Communicate! Referring to the previous, your unsaid may not always be heard!
· Do not take anybody for granted. Everybody has something to contribute.
· If you believe strongly in positive and negative vibes, better to stay away from the negative vibes rather than attempting to handle them!
· Find your areas of interest, and don’t wait any longer to finding the means to pursue them!
· Misunderstandings and fights, necessary evils of any relationship…just make sure they don’t fray the fabric of the relationship! Always try and target fights towards the problem itself and not towards the other person!
· Take good care of yourself. Gorge at times, but mostly eat right! Find your favourite means of exercising your body and relaxing your mind. You would want to still be able to walk, eat and think when you are older right!
· Don’t take things too seriously…find humour in everything you come across. Helps to have somebody who thinks that way too, with whom you can laugh your head off!
· Love and respect yourself and you will find that others love you a little more! However, there could be that thin line between loving oneself and self-obsession!
· …

So, you think you know somebody!

As the train screeched to a halt in what appeared to be the midst of nowhere, amma peered concernedly out of the window, impatience surging through her, being only some hours away from her destination. She could see a station further ahead and the reason for the sudden halt disturbed her. She turned enquiringly towards her co-passengers, a family of four and a lone young man who happened to be a doctor, all of whom she had become acquainted with since the night before. Gradually they came to learn that a faulty crack lay in the track ahead, which could have caused a derailing if the train had progressed, and that it might take an hour or more to rectify. The uncertain indefinite wait ahead seemed torturous and desperation to seek alternative means of reaching their destination heightened among the passengers, including amma. So when the family of four decided to step out of the train and engage a taxi for the rest of the journey, amma impulsively took up the offer to travel along with them. The eternally poised and usually reticent amma picked up her (fortunately light) bags and alighted from the train, walking with some difficulty on the path beside the train filled with large stones and gravel. The group walked past the train, reached the station and was proceeding onto the road to hail a taxi, when the sound of the train horn signaling its departure reached them! What would have been sweet music to their ears had they still been seated inside the train turned to one inducing mouths opening with panic and disbelief! Adrenalin rushing, the group raced back through the station and towards the train and to their ultimate horror they realized that the train had started moving. Painfully hurrying over the stony path, arms stretched out waving and flailing frantically in an effort to catch the attention of the engine driver, they reached close enough to the slow moving engine to hear the driver ask them if they were passengers of that particular train. Heads nodding vigorously along with a loud “YES” the group paused to heave a huge sigh of relief when the train stopped enough for them to rush into the closest coach. Amma could not believe their luck and joined the animated talk about their near-miss experience, attempting to ignore the pain in the soles of her feet from the difficult marathon over the stones. To cut the story short, amma reached home safe and unhurt to tell the tale to her family, but only after having accepted yet another friendly offer by the doctor to give her a drop home from the station in his friend’s car!

The protagonist amma turns out to be my mother and I do thank God that the story ended well. I always took it for granted that I had this affectionate, composed, correct and cautious woman all figured out, having known her for nearly four decades! And bam! this revelation, of this completely new impulsive, spontaneous, adventurous side to her that I never really knew existed! As I see it, she probably didn’t see this coming either! However, I do like what I see (albeit a nail-biting-tension-filled four hour wait until she reached home safe and sound) and the thought that my mother can even at this age reinvent herself without rigidly conforming too closely to the expected comes as a fresh breath of air. After the initial role reversal of admonishing her about lurking dangers and the harm she could have encountered I loved to be able to laugh along with her when the humorous side of the story sunk in. At that moment, sitting by her side reliving the experience and laughing out aloud, I felt like we connected in yet another way, like she was more approachable, like she had playfully skipped down a little from being a guarded parent!

For You PM

A plethora of emotions flowed through Prathima’s mind, superficially numbed by the sight of her husband’s still body lying in the dreaded ice box, his eyes shut as if in deep sleep, face calm and serene. Prathima stared at him tears flowing down her face willing him to wake up any second, disbelief and denial of the present creeping in to protect her traumatized mind from the brutal blow of reality. Hushed voices around her mingled with those swirling within her mind until finally she was unable to differentiate between the two. She wished that she could grab hold of both her young daughters and disappear into a shell, insulated from the external evidence of tragedy.

When dusk turned to night, sounds of deep slumberous breathing all around her, Prathima lay eyes wide open on a thin mat on the floor knowing that sleep would continue to evade her for many more nights to come. Her pillow already damp with unrelenting tears, mind devoid of hope and reason to live, she suddenly felt the weight of her daughter’s palm resting on her shoulder, whether as a gesture of reassurance or as a need to maintain comforting contact with the surviving parent. The touch instantly pierced through the painful layers of despair, sorrow and hopelessness, evoking a sense of being, of the need to exist to witness the welfare and happiness of her daughters, of a meaningful tomorrow…

Office Blues

Hunched over the desktop computer in the office with hardly any work and attempting to appear busy, I am all of a sudden seized by this moment of introspection….am I in the right place, where I am meant to be? Do I need to undergo a certain experience here, at this moment in space and time, which is to guide and lead me further ahead? Hmm, I do wonder…. Could such an unhealthy posture (there is that pain in my back and the tug in my neck that I have never felt until now, and is it my imagination or can I actually feel my backside stretching and enlarging through the long hours of contact with the chair) added to the mostly uninterrupted staring at an impersonal machine, that does at times wondrously seem to have a life of its own, be the base for a life-enriching experience for me that could open other doors to further understanding, knowledge and enlightenment and ultimately to a sense of evolving into a better human being as the years roll on by?
I look around me at my ‘associates’, each positioned in such a way that there is no scope for eye contact (except with the machine in front of them) with one another, unless a conscious effort is made to break-free from the straitjacket posture and swivel in the graciously offered ‘swivel-able’ seat (to which are glued the backsides) to exchange a few words or laughs, personal interactions often taken for granted but which serve as a lifeline to retaining sanity and being grounded to reality in such a virtual-dependant working environment.
If this is the ‘now’, what is the future going to be like?
Here we are working to earn money for our daily needs and added comforts and luxuries, but at the cost of stretching our physical body beyond its capacity of endurance in several possible ways, blunting the natural spontaneous responses and thought processes of our mind to limit and hold it within the functioning requirements and confines of the so called work space.
Instantly I realize that this is not where I am meant to be….. I understand the need for a regular income, but I also respect my mind, body and spirit individually and as a unit, well-enough to realize that ultimately personal growth and evolution comes not from a monthly paycheck, but through exercising our core being, expressing and receiving with no artificial limitations, finding joy and happiness in small non-descript events and experiences through each day, experiencing moments that touch the depths of our soul, in the process invigorating and enriching our mind-body-spirit unit.
The ideal solution would be to fit myself into a form of work that pays enough to keep me comfortably off and simultaneously helps me to respond and think as a human being, that helps me to find myself in the meaningful work that I do. I have been down such an incredibly self-discovering outward-reaching road before and maybe that is the primary reason why I am unable to connect with or relate to my present job, where I gain an income with the sole aim of trying to increase revenue for another. I am beginning to look at it as merely an added learning experience that has taught me an important lesson…. in order to value anything one does need to experience everything!
Now, all I need to do is to sift through options and decide on the right road to turn into (I know, if only it was as easy as that; but again I will never know unless I do take that turn!)….