What have you been working on?
I am aware that I am a buzzing bee. Irritating. Aggravating. Nonstop buzzing. All. The. Time. But, that’s just me. I have stopped expecting others to match my vibe. I have mentioned that Porumei or patience is one of the most important things I have learned over the years. And this year, I have spent quite some time going deeper into this life skill.
My life pre-covid and post-covid are very different. Precovid, I was less stressed, less worried, and was confident that my family unit was unshakeable. And then COVID hit, and we were locked down in different locations, making it seem almost as if we were imprisoned. The kids went through a rapid growth spurt – physically and emotionally, maybe slightly marred by the stresses of living with a single parent. Paranoia was a constant companion. No news was good news, and it became my new mantra.
Eventually, as things started to open up, we slowly moved back to being a single unit living together. all of us getting used to the shared spaces, adjusting to the growth spurts, and attempting to bridge the emotional chasms those few months apart had brought about. vaccinations, and a few more months of masked months later, we hit the curve of self-discovery and development. This was the time I signed up for a course on goal setting at the beginning of the new year, and a course on digital marketing followed it. The interesting part about digital marketing was stalking – a topic right up my alley.
Back in the day, we used to live a street away from the kids’ school. and we were privy to every word uttered in the school assembly. We cheered when the kids’ names were announced and stressed when they were pulled up for discipline issues. Stalking was the norm. So when I found out that digital marketing does stalking, keeping track of who visited your website or social media when and why they left, completing those circles of need-fulfillment for a customer became easy. I always wished there was a similar setup in real life, and I could stalk the family just as easily. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for the kids, that is not so. And the biggest lesson I have learned since then is to leave them for longer periods, giving them the freedom to learn by making mistakes.
This lesson on patience gains importance for different reasons in different parts of our lives. Patience is required when you have toddlers who are trying to understand the world. Their never-ending “whys?” just lays the foundation for a lifetime of “whys?” that we as parents have to answer for them and ourselves. Patience or Porumei, like Amma used to say, is a different beast when you have teenagers underfoot, and honestly, this is when you realize this is the one thing you can never master. The more you learn, the more there is to learn, and the layers blend seamlessly as time goes by.
All these years, I always thought that patience as a character trait had to be learned to understand and accommodate another being – a family member or even your kid. It is only now I realize that this lesson is personal, and I have just about started to extend this learning for myself, where I am learning to be patient with my shortcomings and generous with the praise for all that I have achieved. I still buzz around. I still go at things head-first. But I have learned to listen to my body and only take on things that I think I can manage. Even in these instances, I have slowly started accepting that maybe I have overestimated the effort and have started to accommodate a more generous timeline to meet deadlines. I have realized the importance of not being harsh on myself. Porumei is indeed a life skill that redefines what is important in life and I hope to continue on this journey of learning as long as I can.
Just a little more 