creative
For about half of my life, I’ve felt like an outsider looking in. As far as I can tell, this started back in middle school when my parents moved me from one school to another. In my previous school I’d been the popular kid and a teachers’ pet, so I naively took all that bluster and confidence with me to the new school. This ultimately culminated in a dressing-down by the class teacher with my classmates taking turns complaining about me.
> If you do a good deed and nobody knows, does it count?
I hate litter, and as a kid I even hated people who littered. The streets of India have a lot of trash on them, and I would go out of my way to pick up large pieces of trash and deposit them in trash cans. I wonder, is all the trash I picked up tallied in a ledger somewhere?
We get caught up in our daily lives.
Exercise. Bills. Friends. Commitments. The pursuit of happiness.
And slowly but surely, the world gets smaller.
And smaller.
And smaller.
And smaller.
And it’s not as obvious as the pictures above. You’re busy living life after all. Pursuing the dream. Work hard today, and you will get everything your heart desires.. somewhere down the line. Isn’t that what the books and movies tell us?
For the past few years I’ve been looking forward to an extended stay in the States. I had a long list of things I’d do, people I’d meet, places I’d see, dishes I’d try, etc.
I’ve been here for about six weeks now, and the only thing (well, one of two things) that’s consistently on my mind is.. the next quiz. The next homework. The assignment that’s due three weeks from now.
In my last post I talked about how members of a community are expected to follow some basic rules in order to make that community thrive. And that’s one of the requirements for a successful community. And what do members of a community get out of said membership? A sense of belonging. Humans are social animals by design. It is in our nature to thrive in a group of like-minded individuals rather than in a solitary setting.
There was a time - back in college - when I could see the world in black and white. Things people did could be unilaterally classified as “good” or “bad, and anyone doing even a single bad thing was equivocally bad. A friend of mine rebuked me for taking such a hard stance; she insisted that one could not look at the world in monochrome, that things only exist in shades of grey.