Just Go with it

A friend was asking me about Eurorail passes and I had absolutely no idea. The last time I travelled by train in Europe was  from Dover to Ghent and Bruges in Belgium and that was three decades ago. One day later when I checked my mailbox , there was an article on Budget travel under About.com with write-ups about train travel. What a coincidence. When I was thinking about the tennis games  I  had during the week, I came across someone’s rambling about how she was okay with losing a match in tennis although the writer regarded herself as ambitious. The writer has echoed my sentiments indeed. Not caring about winning or losing a game in sports and being competitive as a person are not mutually exclusive. 

I recently met a young couple from Nice with whom I had a  couple of meals and a tennis game. On the day after I had breakfast with the young French couple together with friends, there lay in my mailbox an article entitled : Back to Provence in New York Times Travel Despatch. Another coincidence. I had lunch with my younger daughter at a café the other day and when the food was brought to her , I asked if her hands were clean, she answered in the affirmative as she flipped through the pages of the Female magazine which she picked up at the cafe. I commented that she had been tapping on her phone ( meaning you probably think your fingers are clean but …) and at that moment, she turned over something she read  and yelp ,
 “ Oh Mom, according to this , our mobile phone is probably thrice dirtier than a toilet bowl …”  Subsequently, during our evening walk, I spoke to her about how it was a generalized statement when employees  would perceive that  “ women bosses are harder to work under”. When I got back to our house and as I checked my emails, I came across the trailers for the new movie  “ Horrible Bosses”.  Thought that was funny.

You may have experienced how you had to speak to someone and that someone happened to call you or you bumped into him or her. You may be agonizing about how to go about things and you come across someone who can provide you the link or the contact. Whenever I need to look for something that has been misplaced whether for myself or the office or my daughters , I have to try to visualize where it could be and there are times I manage while other times I cannot. If I wanted to find the misplaced stuff bad enough,  I would persevere and  I found that if I could step back a little, I might just have the hunch where I would find the missing stuff and it usually resurfaced. When I take things easy and relax, I can think better and ideas flow naturally.

 

I was telling my partner at work that I really wished I could hide away somewhere and go through all the books I had purchased recently. I found it difficult to explain why  I still do not seem to have the luxury to indulge in reading even though these days  I have more time at my disposal since I no longer have to ferry my children to and from classes and extra curricular activities.  In reading  what Stephnie Staal wrote in “Reading Women” , I am  grateful to come across  the following sentence: “ I examined my life through Beauvoir’s gimlet eye, I saw the trips not taken, the flirtations not followed up on, the adventures not experienced; I saw the many moments of my life claimed by others……. I saw the novels interrupted, ….the fights, the frustration, the laundry, the birthday parties, the time spent worrying about this , worrying about that. Such restrictions compelled by the responsibilities of family life are nothing new, but the ache of missed opportunities felt exceptionally sharp and undeniable at that moment.” It is uncanny that the Staal’s observations describe my reflections most aptly and sum up pretty much how time could slip away without much ado . Spot on.

Yes life is made of opportunities as well as coincidences. But it becomes too surreal when those thoughts of yours leap into view the minute you open the newspaper or turn a page of the novel you just start to read. Spooky maybe. So I am definitely one who believes in keeping our minds free in order to be in touch with our instincts and in tune with the present. What I have to keep reminding myself is to stop worrying. There had been times when I could smell trouble and there was trouble so I really like to avoid thinking about trouble. Call it professional hazard, after staying in legal practice for more than two decades, it is almost impossible to think the best of another person’s intentions or not worry about adversaries and conflicts. This is because when we choose to stop reading more into another’s actions, we have been proven wrong again and again.  I come to conclude that when we tell ourselves life is not complicated, we are really fooling ourselves. Nothing is absolute and one should follow one’s intuition.  Ultimately it is how we make out our lives to be and it is  our inner voice that will guide us to where we want to be so long as we are open to the journey.