This past Saturday afternoon we spent time moving through ordinary tasks. Folding laundry, paying bills, and general clean-up took most of the day. This routine is something I usually cherish. As my husband and I finished our tasks, we talked about fixing a late afternoon snack.

Our daughter overheard our conversation. Within a span of a few minutes, we heard the rustle of the bag sheltering the bread and the refrigerator opening. I asked my daughter what she was doing in the kitchen, but she said, “I am just checking on something.” As soon as she finished her sentence, the clang of metal hits the sink. My husband and I both start to wonder what she was really doing, but neither one of us made any movement toward her direction.

The next sound we hear are the thump-thump of her feet. She hasn’t quite mastered inside voice or soft feet yet so we always know she is about the make an entry or exit. In her hands, she had a paper plate and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  She said, “I know you were both hungry, so I made a sandwich.” Her gap-filled grin and the echo of pride in her voice choked me up. The unprompted simple gesture caused me to turn my head away from her and wipe away some tears. “Thank you honey. That was so sweet of you.” We both swallowed her with hugs and kisses, while emphasizing that she “cooked” for us for the first time.

So uncomplicated. So simple. And yet so fulfilling. It made me think about how as adults we tend to overcomplicate areas of our own life. What happened to taking the simple approach? What changes as we “grow up”? I am not certain there is a satisfying answer to these questions. But I know there is no mistaking how I filled up inside by something so unlikely. There are, I am certain, so many of these moments in all of our lives. My daughter’s gesture reminded me that I need to be aware of the vastness and grandeur of simplicity.

Image by {N} Duran

I finished. This past Sunday I participated in my second half-marathon. A few days before, family and friends asked, “Are you ready?” It was difficult to answer this question because in all honesty I really never know whether I am ready to run 13.1 miles.

The first few miles are always inspiring. I always notice who runs with me. There were women in pink and yellow tutus, hula skirts, and ones who ran in honor of a loved one. Some ran with their kids, while others sported various shirts reflecting the charities that were dear to them. One man wore a Happy Birthday hat, the number 57 proudly screaming alongside the rim.  Running doesn’t discriminate. It appeals to the young and old, the physically fit and disabled, and all shapes and sizes.

As I hit the ten mile mark, my legs ached and the bottom of my feet began to burn. On the right, I noticed the mountains of Papago park. The curved and red formations were extraordinary, but my feet wobbled as I felt the incline under my feet. At that point, I wanted to stop. But I didn’t. I kept moving forward.

That’s what it is all about. Every single time when I run, I feel it. This need to keep moving forward because it is the best way to celebrate life. To embrace breath and acknowledge the ability to run. It’s that simple.

I run because I can.

There are two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle.  Albert Einstein

Two days ago, every single instance of inconvenience created a churning irritability in my gut. Each one of us has experienced days when we feel everything is a nuisance. Even though there is nothing really “wrong” we channel that energy into a negative mood. Part of me wallowed in this defeatist attitude. My actions replicated what itched in my mind. I admonished my daughter for spilling her milk, my tone in conversations over the phone reflected some speckles of annoyance, and the man who cut me off in traffic caused me to curse under my breath. Everything trivial. But all led to my general bad attitude.

In the midst of this negativity, I don’t know what prompted me to access my camera roll on my phone. As I thumbed through the pictures, I caught a glimpse of a picture that I took before a sandstorm in Phoenix. Even though I’ve viewed this picture a few times, the layer cake in the sky startled me. The raw look at nature jolted my conscience into thinking about gratitude. To truly be consistently grateful, there must be a call to look at everything as a miracle. The incidents that annoyed me earlier in the day could easily be viewed from another perspective. Yes, my daughter spilled her milk. But at least she has the capability of drinking milk from a cup, understanding and appreciating the need to clean it up, and also saying, “Sorry for the accident.”  There are children, because of mental or physical limitations, who can’t engage in the most basic of activities. Because my daughter can, that in itself is an ordinary miracle. As much as I was annoyed regarding my phone conversations, just a month ago, I lost my voice and found it particularly challenging to convey my thoughts. But how quickly I forget about those old challenges. I did what was easiest. I gave into the irritation. It is something that comes naturally to all of us. To give in and to forget about what is.

It takes a conscious effort to engage. To really synthesize what it is that surrounds you and what a privilege it is to breathe and sleep and laugh and cry. Even the irritation is an affirmation that you still have the capacity to experience. And that is what I think we miss everyday. The gift of living should startle us and raise our awareness, that yes, it is a miracle.

]]> http://beingrudri.com/2012/01/13/what-we-miss-everyday/feed/ 10 http://beingrudri.com/2012/01/09/six/ http://beingrudri.com/2012/01/09/six/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:32:14 +0000 Rudri http://beingrudri.com/?p=2963

On January 8th, you turned six. This morning you told me, “I can’t be five forever. I am six. You turned six too, Momma. Do you remember?” I understand your six, but I am reluctant to accept it. Everytime we celebrate your birthday, a part of me realizes I need to let go.

There is so much of you that I love. Not a regular kind of love, but love that I feel in my marrow. Belly-laughs. Conversations about what you learned at school. Watching you grasp a monkey bar and letting go of another. Your love of anything crafts. I see so much of me in you. You love to read. You write long stories that fill up the blank page. You observe everything. And you are restless just like your Momma. I love it when I am in the middle of anything and you say, “I want to be just like you Momma.” It’s the one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.

You are six.  Now you have to use two hands to show that you are six. In four more years, you won’t be able to show your fingers to indicate your age. This realization is both startling and joyful to witness. You have definitely developed a personality. You love with intensity and with unconditional love. Both are palpable as soon as I receive a hug or kiss from you. Bold and sensitive, I worry about when you feel left out or an unkind word maybe dropped in your direction. I know though these are all curves that you must face. But I hope to equip you with the strength to face whatever adversity may come your way.

But for now, enjoy Six. I love you my dear sweet, lovable little girl. Happy Birthday. xoxo you forever. Momma

For the first time this year, I am dedicating the days of 2012 to one word: compassion. In the past I’ve written resolutions. By mid-February these goals are lost in the shuffle of life. Keeping a single word in mind will enforce a clarity that is new territory for me, but a plan that I am wholly enthusiastic about.

My need to embrace compassion came from an unexpected source. Last year I read  The Same Kind of Different As Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. This story chronicles the friendship of two men, one a rich art collector and the other, a homeless man. What its taught me is something I can never forget. Everyone has a story. The homeless man. The prostitute. The thief. The banker. The doctor. Mothers. Fathers. Children. Sisters. Brothers. Every single one of us. And I think we all forget about the stories that people carry. I know I do. Many, myself included, may encounter the homeless man on the street and quickly assume, “He must have a drug or alcohol habit or he is mentally ill. Or he is lazy. He looks healthy enough, why isn’t he working?” In some cases, this may be the truth, but how often do we ask, “How did he get there?” Where is our compassion? I think  we are conditioned to believe the first thought that comes to mind. And that maybe a product of our upbringing, society, and how we carry ourselves in our own lives.

Compassion is an inclusive concept. It also means embracing compassion as a way of being gentle with yourself. I know that many times I’ve felt I am not enough. As a woman, wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend. What compassion does is allows you to feel a freedom that liberates you to not judge yourself or linger a little with your flaws. I think we don’t get lessons about compassion in our everyday lives. It happens in the context of some tragic event, like a shooting or weather catastrophe. I want to integrate compassion as a part of my day to day life. For me, I hope it becomes a better way to walk toward love.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.  - Dalai Lama

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What is your word of the year?

But what minutes!  Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

New Year’s Eve is something that I’ve never quite understood. In all honesty, the celebration of time passing carries sadness for me. Because the movement of the clock is so pensive, counting down the seconds to the next year is not an activity I relish.

My past has brought me to above realization. In 2008, I witnessed  New Year’s Eve in the confines of a hospital room. The smell of burnt coffee littered the hallways, the flower pot  painting on the waiting room felt out of place, and the beep-beep of the monitor made me feel like the pit in my stomach was growing outside of me. My father suffered a seizure and my family took turns keeping vigil by his bedside. I still remember the texture of the  thin grey-blue patterned carpet and how I laid a blanket from home on the ground. As the clock hit 11:00 p.m., I told my Dad that 2009 approached. He didn’t hear me. My only conversation that night was with Dick Clark’s New Years Eve special. As I write this, the fragility of those minutes still stirs anxiety in me.

What that experience has taught me is this: All 525,600 minutes of a year are important. You don’t need a calendar or a New Year’s Eve celebration to tell you that. Every minute is a passage. Through open roads. Or confined tunnels. To happiness. Or sadness. To silence. To noise. To death. To life. But all of it, every single minute, is essential.

This year take a vow to honor your minutes. They define your passage.

I knocked on the door but no one answered. A lone black container took vigil on the porch. I knocked again. Silence. The door stayed closed. I know it won’t open, but yet I am not ready to say goodbye. My car keys slip out of my hand. The jingle of the metal landing on the porch took me to a time when I had the right keys to enter. Not anymore.

I drove to my childhood home in September of this year. As I walked to the driveway, I saw the familiar mailbox where I remember racing barefooted to see what unexpected surprises might be waiting in the envelopes. The creme and black bricks stared back at me and in a brief flash, I saw my young self studying late into the nights on our kitchen dining table, the boom-box in my room on my scratched dresser, and how when my parents and my sister slept, I drew smiley faces on the bottom of their feet.

But now, another family seeks refuge  in my childhood home. And the enormity of that thought hit me several times this past year. I know this. Life is filled with a continuum of goodbyes.  And as we do so, we are all standing vigil on our metaphorical porches. But are we really the enjoying the sway of the rocking chair? Are we drinking our tea slow? Do we hear the laughter of our children as we watch them grow? Do we breathe in the smell of the fresh grass or the budding roses?

This is what I’ve been asking myself: Do we really know and feel what we are living as we pass through each day?  I’ve whispered and yelled the mantra, Be here now. And only in the last year, did I really understand the true meaning of this phrase. It doesn’t mean I am always living in the present, but accepting the fact that controlling uncertainity is an allusion.

Being here now for me means really embracing what happens before my continuum of goodbyes.

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Happy New Year to you and yours. My hope for all of you is to really be mindful of the present. Thanks so much reading and commenting and traveling with me. All of you give me the courage everyday to face the page and fill it with my truth and for that I am forever grateful.

xoxo Rudri 

Image by woodleywonderworks

“My whole life is in that house.” That’s what Madonna Badger screamed on Christmas morning as her Connecticut house burned to the ground with her three children and her parents still trapped inside. On December 25, 2011, Ms. Badger lost her past and her legacy.

In an instant, everything for her changed.

I am humbled when I think about how the permanence our everyday life can be so transient  and how ordinary life is what keeps us afloat. We all complain about the everyday. Too many dishes in the sink. Running late for a business meeting or an evening dinner with friends. Traffic. Deadlines. Children crying. We all think we are on the edge with the mundane, but the glory is in those quotidian details.

In an instant, for every one of us, what we may take for granted, can change.

Fill yourself up with all the quiet details in your life. A cup of coffee. The morning commute. The rattling of old pipes or creaky walls in your house. The cries of your five year old’s nightmare in the middle of the night. The sometimes inconveniences of everyday life. They are details to be embraced.

In an instant. It can all change.

Yesterday evening, in-between my vaccuming the floors, my daughter, says affirmatively to me, “I believe in Santa.”  I replied, “Of course, you believe in Santa. Why wouldn’t you?” She looks at me like a lighthouse and says, “I heard a girl say she didn’t believe in Santa.” The conversation ended as abruptly as it began. She resumed bouncing around, from one sofa to next, and then she took an occasional break to color in her book. I restarted the vaccum, but her words echoed over my space.

It made me think about Deceember festivities and what the holiday season means to me. There is no question that as a child and and as an adult, even as a Hindu I  celebrated Christmas with my family. I remember listening to my father chant his prayer in front of the mini-shrine temple in our home on a cold December day. In the corner, we had a large Christmas tree filled with lights that looked as if they made eyes at you every time you walked by. I always wondered why, despite their deep Hindu roots they felt the need to put a Christmas tree in the house? I never asked, it just became a part of our life every Christmas. So much about celebrating a holiday that we couldn’t claim as our own was fun. Fruitcake arrived a few days before from the famous Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas, we exchanged presents, and slurped our hot chocolate in front of the fire. You could feel the goodness and the breath of belief in the air. Not knowing what the next year would hold, but believing that your family would be there to love you no matter what.

It’s a tradition we are creating with our daughter. We also have a Christmas tree in our house, as well as stockings, and a mini-temple sits in the corner of our home. But it is what you believe that transcends the obvious. And so when she said, “I believe in Santa,” it took me to a time in my childhood, of what I still believe today. The holidays, no matter what your religious preference, is a time of family, friends and feeling the emotion of love and being loved. It’s simple, obvious and even plays to the cliche, but it is the essence.

Wishing each one of you a very Happy Holiday Season. Hoping you believe too. xoxo Rudri

As soon as my daughter wakes up, she asks, “How many hours did I sleep?” I’ve learned the hard way that it pleases her if she accumulates more than ten hours of sleep.  ”I think you slept for eleven hours. Come on. Let’s get ready for school.” She heads to the bathroom and into the shower and before she puts one foot on the surface of the tile, she asks,” Will you do a hairstyle for me?” In order to avoid tears at an early hour, I automatically say yes.

She stands on her step-stool as I attempt to braid her hair. It is part of our normal morning routine. As I weave several strands of hair together, she whispers something that makes a permanent impression inside of me, “When I grow up, I want to be a Momma. Just like you.” Her eyes look directly into me and I stand up to attention. She gives me a giant bear hug and her feet skip into her room.

I am still standing looking at the mirror and repeating her words in my head. She skipped into her room at the right moment. There is a single tear down my cheek. I ponder her unequivocal affirmation of what I do for her and myself in the words,”I want to be a Momma.” Part of me couldn’t ignore the obvious metaphor of braiding her hair.  As mothers, much of what we weave doesn’t appear extraordinary. It is in the everyday minutae. We try to braid the best for our children.  Shuffling them to school. Making certain they ate the right amount of vegetables. Helping with a science fair project. Consoling them when they hurt from a little scrape. Encouraging them to play well with others. Making certain they get enough hours of sleep.

It was one line and a single moment. We went on with our day. I drove her to school and headed back to the house. She doesn’t see me fumbling, but piecing it all together for her. Just like the braid in her hair. And these words contained in it - When she grows up, she wants to be a Momma. Just like me.