Jargogled Impressions.

Hey there little one –

You completed 3months a few days back and what a joy these past 3 months have been! While your mum today is worried about your feeding habits, she has been a Rockstar with ensuring you get what you need so far and am sure she will do the same going forward too! As you grow, your needs will shift, and your presence would be more intentional. You will grow out of some things and bring in new moments of pure happiness for your mum and me. Just seeing you grow over these past few months has been therapeutic for me as I know it will continue to be in the future too. I also tend to become a bit wistful knowing that these moments with you will not come back again, and you won’t be this small again. But I will take that in my stride because I am looking forward to seeing what’s next for you as you grow up to be a wonderful-, kind-, and large-hearted girl.

In terms of milestones this month, there were a number of things and antics you picked up – including, the thing you do when you grab your knees with your hands and sort of go into a yoga pose (child’s pose?), that chuckle you so selectively offer up after hours of trying and coaxing, the bridge pose you go into when your demands aren’t met. In each one of these moments, it really does seem to me that you are becoming more intentional and more conscious of what you are doing. Whereas previously, your hands used to have a life of its own and went about like it was trying to search blindly for something, these days it seems that your hands are controlled by those million little neurons in your head. For when you bind your two hands together it seems as if you like doing it, and when you constantly bring your hands to your mouth – as if constantly hungry and willing to explore the world with your mouth – it does seem to me that it’s very intentional as well. Your eyes too – they now move and trace objects you see around you, I can see you excited about taking it all in with your 360 degrees turn of head to absorb whatever it is you are seeing and grasping in this home of ours. I like to believe that you have started responding to sounds as well – maybe not your name just yet – but to sounds that interest you.

Further, I would like to believe that you have taken very well to me reading daily to you. While previously you used to look around and not focus on the illustrations in the book, now I can see your mind whirring as you peruse those colorful illustrations in the book. From “Giraffes can’t dance”, “The Little Blue Truck”, “The Elusive Moose”, “The Frozen II”, “The Little Blue Boat”, “The Angry Bird” – there are a number of books that I have now read to you multiple times and it seems you like them all. One of my favorite past time with you is to have you lie on your back and then I lie besides you as I open the book suspended in the air so you can look the illustrations while I read to you. It’s a habit I want to consciously inculcate in you because I feel like it’s a habit that has helped me a lot in becoming who I am today. I look forward to building a tradition with you where both of us could pick a book we can read together even after you grow up. As you grow and change and become what you will, I am sure some habits will fade away while new ones will surface that will seem more attractive to you. My hope is that we can build on this habit together though while knowing fully well that ultimately it will be you who will decide on whether to continue with it. You will change over the years, while I would start to tether myself to old habits and preferred ways of living – there’s bound to be a generational gap here. I often wonder where this gap manifests itself more and why.

I find it interesting to observe that even as I am changing with you (and because of you), I think there are some fixed aspects of me that will likely stay the same. It could be one of the thousands of mental models that I have baked into my consciousness, or it could be my outlook towards what constitutes a good life built around my experiences to-date on this planet. Whatever it is, as I look at and observe my parents (your grandparents), it intrigues me to observe the stodginess that comes with age, and I can see myself becoming more like my parents as I grow older. Maybe some things are supposed to turn out that way because, owing to evolution or what-not, these are the most efficient and effective ways with which we make sense of our existence. As with the reading habit, it’s an outlook towards life that is distinctly my own and that I cannot give up despite what the world may be telling me. When we are young, we tend to equate that with rigidity or inflexibility. As we grow older, we realize these are in fact mechanisms we have perfected and adopted for the distinct life that we all lead. It should not, however, be a reason to evade the responsibility we all have of constantly evaluating and testing our biases and assumptions towards life. When something is anachronistic and no longer true, we must all build a “system” to identify and correct those mental models that have served their purpose and are ready to fade away.

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” ~ Bruce Lee