The Astronomical Clock in Prague |
About a year ago, my elder daughter asked me, “ Mom, it is said that a woman cannot have it all. That's true right?” I reckon she and her friends were talking about how a woman must balance her work and family thus it is not possible to have it all. I am not sure if I gave her an answer. Maybe I did not want to discourage her and I wanted to sound optimistic, I might have mumbled something incoherent that I have no recollection.
A month ago, my younger daughter
who is nineteen said to me, “ Mom I want to try so many things. There are just so many different things
I want to do.” That was when she was trying to decide which societies to join
in her first year at the university. It is wonderful that she is keen to get involved with the student communities. Her enthusiasm is commendable.
In his memoir “ What I talk
about when I talk about Running” Haruki Murakami writes about his experience in running and preparing for marathons and how running intersects with writing for him. He writes about how he has to accept
the fact that as he ages, he will not be able to run the way he used to. He
writes, “ Just as I have my own role to play, so does time. And time does its
job much more faithfully, much more accurately, than I ever do.” He observes that physical decline is
waiting as you age and though it is not one of your happier realities, you will have to get used to that.
It is a fact that time is ever
moving forward without a moment’s rest. Thus it is not important to compete
against time but it is important to know one’s limitations and as long as we
are physically fit and able, we make the best use of our time to do whatever we
enjoy doing. But what happens when there are still so much more to explore and
to learn about? The question is how can we prevent ourselves from getting all
wired up in order to fit in all the things we must do and also things we like
to do?
Whether we are young or old, we
do not know what tomorrow awaits us until tomorrow comes. Meanwhile whatever
strong desires we have about doing something, we probably should just give it
everything we have to set out to do it. So can we try to do it all?
Maybe if we really want something
bad enough, if we know for certain what we want, we will somehow make it
happen, otherwise we just have to accept that we cannot have or do everything.
That is life. It is not just us women who cannot have it all. Nobody can have
it all. The author of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair My Year of Magical Reading, Nina Sankovitch wrote in her reading memoir about what else she wanted for her children; Ms Sankovitch told her husband about Murakami, “
He doesn’t try to do it all.” Murakami dedicated himself to writing when he
decided that writing would be the focus of his life so he gave up socializing
and change his lifestyle to suit his new vocation.
Like Ms Nina Sankovitch, I would quote Murakami’s words to
my daughters:
“ You really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what
order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of
system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of
balance.”
To be able to do something
totally well, we should totally and definitely commit to the task and tackle it
with singularity and rigour if and when we decide to do it. But the difficulty for most of us when we
are young is to know what is it that we would
like to do with such conviction
and quite often nothing specific comes to mind. So tick – tock, tick- tock………..
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