Shilpa Roy Kota

What do you do when you set out on a cross country, round trip drive spanning more than 2000 kms extending from Arabian Sea to Bay of Bengal and back? I don’t know what you do, but this is what I did. After I was done arguing, debating, justifying and negotiating with my family (co-passengers) I drove, I thought, I listened to music and I had some very  ground breaking realizations. Sharing some of these soul stirring emotions on my blog:

1. It is not just the beauty of the landscape or the smoothness of the road which make the journey memorable. More so, it is the unexpected bumps, speed breakers, missed turns, punctured tires and eccentric fellow motorists  that add spice and emotion to the journey and leave you with stories that you will remember for generations to come. I thank God that my life’s journey is not a smooth, scenic drive but full of bumps, curves and senseless drivers who have helped me make my journey memorable. Absolutely Humbling!
2. Weddings are fun! Great food, great company, great conversations! All packed in  few short days! It is fun to meet the latest, youngest additions to the family and heart of hearts feel grateful that your own kids are way older. I no longer need to carry around dirty  diapers in baby bags or feed curd rice to a body which is in constant motion. Phew! Eternal Gratitude!
3.  Children tend to get tired during long drives. I have 3 of this specie in my family – my son, my daughter and my husband. I have found a trick to manage them so I can drive in peace. When I get behind the driving wheel, I immediately put my favorite podcast of Vedanta or Yoga. As the wise, timeless knowledge echoes in the confines of our car, all children are fast asleep in flat 2 minutes. I can now soak in these precious words in peace with my husbands loud snoring giving the background music to the golden words of Adi Shankaracharya. Soul stirring Bliss!
4. Like any old Indian Aunty, I have to do a postmortem of the wedding after the wedding is over. Long car drives are ideal place to look back, appreciate the meticulous planning, effort and love with which the wedding was conducted. It is also an ideal time to document best practices and start planning your own daughters wedding. Pavan and I shortlisted the venue, the decorations and the gifts for the guests during this car drive. A couple of more weddings and long drives and I am sure we would have also shortlisted the groom, the grooms family and the other paraphernalia to go along with the wedding. We just have another 10 years or so before our daughter is ready for marriage. Note to self – Got to keep attending more weddings from now on. Irresistibly Enticing!
5. We stared our return journey at around 9:30AM in the morning. ETA to Pune was 2:09AM. We sped, made up on some time. ETA dropped. We stopped, fueled the car. ETA jumped back to 2:09AM. We sped some more, honked a little harder, made up on some more time. ETA dropped again. We stop for emptying our bowels so we can fill our tummy once again. We got back in the car. ETA was back to 2:09AM.I cant believe you  have nothing better to do and  you are still reading this blog. Amazing! Please stop spending so much time on social media. Go take a long drive instead. You might discover some better insights than what you will find on this blog! This is perhaps the best piece of advice you have ever received on this blog! Priceless isn’t it!?!

I saw a picture of the cutest toddler running free

Instantly, I saw the reflection of his Mom and his Dad in his profile

Oh wow! I wondered

What a fine balance of both genes he has picked up

My nephew is doing some extraordinary work for a not profit

My heart swells with pride when I think that he belongs to my gene pool

Essentially, who we are, is a mix bag of genes that we have inherited

Of course, our hard work, our lifestyle has a lot to do with how successful we become

But there are some things that just come into being because of the DNA that makes us up

Just like an apple seed will turn out to be an apple tree, no matter how hard we wish for it to bloom with rose flowers

Taking this theory backward, if we want our child to be brilliant in Math

What is a good time to start working on  their Math skills?

When they are 11?

When they are 6?

When they are just born?

Or when they are still in the womb?

Or before we actually conceive them?

My theory is – If I want my child to be naturally good at something

The best bet I have is by being great at it, myself , way before I even conceive that child

Be so good at it such that it becomes a part of my DNA

And then, when my child is born, the odds that they will be good at it too, are higher (there is no guarantee either way)

What’s the point of trying to rub Math into someone who is born with a different DNA makeup

I have thought about this theory many times

And every time I get the same answer

If I want my kids to be good at something, I need to learn to do it well myself

Whether it is before I conceive them or after they are born or once they are 30 years old

I cannot change the DNA of the seed that makes them but I can show them the path by walking on it myself

There is no other way

And even if I do it well myself, there is no guarantee, ever, that they will follow the same path

After all, an apple tree will never flower a rose

So if I really want roses, I have learn to make them myself on my own bush

I cannot wait for my children to make roses for me

I have to let them be the tree that they were meant to be

By the way, if you didn’t know till now, Apples are delicious and way more useful in many ways than….

When we fall and hurt ourselves, our body develops a scab to heal itself. As soon as the body heals, the scab falls and the body is back to being light and free. Imagine, if the scab never fell. Imagine, if everytime we got hurt we accumulated more dead skin on top of our body. Imagine, the weight of the dead cells we would be carrying in a few years and over a lifetime. How grotesque our body would look and how heavy it would feel with so much baggae to carry. Now imagine that one day someone came along and took off a piece of the dead skin to reveal a clean finger hiding underneath it. You would discover what clean skin feels like, movement without dead skin feels like. You would discover all the new things you could do with this new, light, clean finger. If you are willing and open in your mind, you might even discover the possibility that maybe, just maybe, some day more parts of your body could be free from dead skin. Imagine, how uplifting the thought would be – just the possibility of being able to live light and free.

I feel like that today. Uplifted. Because I shed a tiniest piece of baggage off my soul. This is what I learnt in the process.

Just like our body, we face a lot of experiences during the time we live in this body. Some experiences are great and some are not so good. Each time we come across harsh experiences which we are not prepared to deal with, we build a shell around us to protect us from that experience. Think about, as a child, how you dealt with a bully in school, or a strict teacher or a mental/physical abusive relationship at home. Because we were not sure how to deal with it at that time, we learnt to hide behind a protective armor that we built around us inside our head. As long as we could retract inside this armor, we would be safe. The armor was heavy. It was dark inside the armor but it surely felt safe inside it, so we continued to wear it. If the fear ran too deep or the need for the armor extended over a long time, we became better at carrying it around with us, so much so that one day we forgot that we were even wearing that. It had become a part of us. Years went by and life continued to throw a variety of muck at us. Sometimes we covered ourselves with plastic sheets, sometimes with old newspapers and sometimes when faced with hard hitting bullets we used steel. Over time, we just got better at making our protective shields and carrying them all around with us.

As the weight of these so called protective layers kept increasing, we have became heavier and rigid. Even though it is hard, we have learnt to operate with these layers constantly piled up on us. We are slow, tired and in pain but we have no idea what is making life so hard for us. For, like everyone else around us, we too have forgotten the weight of the armour that we had put on us when the first bully punched us in school. Even when we have learnt how to deal with life without adding more safety nets around us, we still carry the old ones around, all the time, just because we have forgotten that they even exist.

For anyone out there, who feels life is hard for them, you know what I am talking about. The constant weight we are carrying on top of us literally manifests on our physical body in aching shoulders, sore knees or worse medical conditions. We find it so hard to manage children, run the house, keep the boss happy and juggle health and entertainment all at the same time. We work so hard day and night to keep the lights running, to keep the future secure and to maintain the social structure in our lives. And yet, each night we come back home and wonder why all of this seems to hard. We wonder, this was not the life we dreamed to have. We wonder, is there something different we could do?

I have learnt that unless we are even aware of the baggage we are carrying, we have no way of setting ourselves free from it. People used to tell me, “You are under stress. You need to relax”. And I would say, “Who me? No way! I am strong and focussed. I am happy juggling the challenges of life. I am not in stress.” Looking back, I can see I had become so good at carrying the weight around me that the weight had become me. I could not even imagine that it was possible to have a life that was light. After all, I am a parent, a daughter, a wife, a manager, a social worker – if I had to perform all these roles well, l had to work hard. How could all of this be easy?

I have learnt, that life can be easy. Life can be fun. And I have experienced this by just chipping a slight dead skin off my little finger. If just this little loss of weight can be so uplifting, I am overwhelmed to imagine the possibilities. How I did it or rather how it happened in my life, is something I will not write about now. For now, I want you to know, it is possible to lose the dead weight we are carrying around in our life. It is possible if we are willing to believe that the weights exists and there are methods to shed it.