A personal affirmation

who are you really and what is the thing that makes you who you are? what do you want in life?

i have a largely boring list of desires. certainly life can be made more comfortable. what do i WANT so much i negate what i have?

because what i have is more valuable to me than all the money in the world.

i was maybe 10- we had moved to india and the light had “gone” as we said. we were in a blackout sitting behind a metal gate at night. trying to keep cool. this is when the ridiculous conversations happened and most often we played antakshani.

my mother began the conversation with the standard question- since my father was in Canada we always played the “what if he showed up” game. and he did one year surprise us.

“what will you do if ur father comes right now and we are sitting here”

my sister was older and without a hesitation declared

“i would run through the gates and hug him- mom you?”

“i would also do the same- aman”

i thought about the question. now i thought to myself well, they have already done the hard work, the hole is made in the gate, two infact. practically speaking i only need to run. so i looked at them and said without hesitation:

“i would run through the hole u have made and hug him”

there was a moment of stunned silence, and then we had to explain to the neighbors what happened.

we have never had much, but i have never doubted that we had love in our family. love has an odd way of preventing stagnation. parents WANT to learn what their kids are doing because they desire to continue to evolve to understand them. and kids want to relate to their parents so they desire to teach. slowly the friction of the generations erodes the conflicts between them and they begin to flow in silent respect.

one looking at the other in gratitude, the other looking with responsibility.

i tried to change. i tried to see if chasing money was as satisfying an endeavor. but u can only have one goal in life.

in many ways we stand on the epoch of a world built on greed. not because people have money but because of why they seek it. money is now power. and power corrupts. power stagnates the world on the points of where it has been collected. horded.

money is no more evil than tulips. it has the same utility. what is money? it is a construct of the human mind. an artificial means to value the nature of labor.

it is a good time to ask oneself, how do you want to die. because climate change and the polarization in the world have indeed brought us to the edge of extinction.

so how does money help you buy caviar when all we have left to eat are beetles? what wine can you drink when the water has been poisoned? who can you command when they have all died?

i cannot say how many years of life is left to live. but i do think my parents punched a really important hole in the path before me. and since they already did the hard work, i am just going to run through that hole and ignore the noise.

love will save the day.