I am reading Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto really slowly. Beautifully written, I am as usual protracting the pleasure of reading something I love, to make it last longer. Living in each word in ways that hold my own life still and allowing the story to become mine.
There are many beautiful subtexts within this book that lead you into other stories about yourself and those you know; making this tender narrative hold parables and life lessons to offer you when you least expect to find them.
I read this passage last night in bed:
It is from a conversation that the father has with his son.
The father says....
'If anyone ever does you a favour, you cannot forget it. You must always credit them, especially in public, especially to those they love and those that love them. You must pay your debts, even those that you can never fully repay. Anything less makes you less.'
We often ride a wave and are carried for a while, but to take it for granted becomes the folly.
I also find that insincerity is a bit like a terminal illness. Those who indulge in it finally are consumed into worlds of manufactured interaction that ring hollow for everyone around them, and isolate themselves from fitting into functioning realities that hold truths they are hiding from.
It is imperative to always confront all things that add up to make the sum of our existence. And in doing this you will certainly find many personal emotional swamps that one can drown in. Whenever my heart feels bruised, I force myself to acknowledge what the core of my personal politics is. I insist that I place emotional sentimentality aside to walk the talk of behavioural ethics that is a determined paradigm already set within this framework of ones personal politics. However difficult it may appear to be at that moment of time, I view it as a methodology which opens up an understanding of infinite learning much more productive than nurturing ones own protective instincts.
The Collective Studio has open discussions that disallow us avoiding issues of accountability, whether professional or personal. We hold this as the basic credo within the philosophy of The Collective Studio and in turn it has allowed for a simple uncomplicated co-existence to prevail. Everyone rallies around the other in those moments that may hold pain or anguish, self doubt or limitations; and so the journeys of self discovery are not lonely missions to be struggled with but where the experiences of others may lend us some strength.
In the same continuing conversation that the father has with his son in Jerry Pinto's book....
the son asks....
'Wouldn't that make you want to run away from it all?'
and the father replies.....
'That's where pride comes in, and stubbornness. The city is a challenge but it's a challenge that doesn't care either way. If you go home, it won't jeer, it just won't notice. You can stay and work hard and make something of yourself and it still won't notice. But you will know. I would have known that I had failed. So I stayed.
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