Jargogled Impressions.

Starting on the million words thing again since I left it a while back given all that has been happening in my personal life recently. For those reading, Naitri, our baby # 2, arrived a few weeks back and the past few days have been all about caring for the little one and seeing her make her way into this world as she learns to pick up the things, the skills, the senses, the everything. It still surprises me the way we grow from an alien looking creature into what we become as we grow to be more human like, with more features that make sense to us.

Parenting two times over. With our fearless toddler we learnt the ropes around first-time parenting – a patient teacher I’d term the elder one. As opposed to the ‘boss baby’ paradigm, I might as well call the kiddo ‘Madam teacher’ as she has, unwittingly perhaps, provided us with the learnings and the skills that we did not know we could pick up, while at the same time endowing us with the disposition that would take a Stoic reader a few decades to master.

Parenting in the modern age is filled with challenges, exertion, anxiety, etc. Given the incessant demands of a never stopping world, coupled with our mimetic desires, parenting can often seem like a moot endeavor. Pursuing our hedonic lifestyles, or our growth bent of mind, or our individual meanings seem like a better alternative. Heck, we considered the practicality of baby #2 so much that our collective heads hurt. In the end, we went with it primarily due to the strong inner intuition that the missus had on ensuring her kids had a sibling they could lean on in their adult life.

So much of what we do has an outlook towards future. The natural predisposition we have towards having kids, regardless of the challenges that come with it, is largely a phenomenon of the ‘selfish gene’ instituting in us a desire to further our quantum bit to the next generation. And so, it stands to reason that we also ensure the social anti-fragility of our off springs. Siblings are friends-by-default, or so the thinking goes and the shared history of growing together (as my brother have attested elsewhere) is kind of magical even years after, even when you are thousands of miles apart, even when you barely are able to talk for months at end.

Shared memories are powerful in more ways than meets the eye. They have the power to transcend individual lifetimes, creating a bridge between generations. They allow us to connect with our ancestors, honor their legacies, and understand our place within the continuum of time.  Passing down stories is arguably the most effective method with which we educate our future generations and memories are efficient tools that allow us, across familial contexts, to knit together rootedness, familiarity, and a sense of collective identity that stands tall amidst the uncertainties of living in the present.

Shared reminiscence makes for a complex experience – complex as in rich, deeply-hidden layers of memories and perceptions. Nostalgia is often mistaken as backwards looking and mushy. It’s more often bracketed under non-productive activity in that it’s information that does nothing other than evoke an emotional response. The emotions themselves are innocent enough that seem to serve no purpose other than remind you of the things and moments and memories that are buried deep inside the neurons and the connections they have spawned and are continuing to spawn – waiting only for the right moment.

For me, the right moment comes often, or maybe I pay attention to them more. A distinctive time of the day, the right temperature and humidity in the air mixed with the natural smell from the fauna, a song that reminds of you a particular era. A close friend called me suddenly a few months back owing to a song that brought back shared memories of us back in the sleepy land of Kota in Rajasthan. The smell from rain falling on unpaved land brought me back to the days I spent cycling to my school in Giridih with rain pouring all over and the smell from the deep recesses of the forested areas that I passed by.

Whatever the trigger may be, these are more often tied to our childhood, and so are many times shared with our siblings. The million little moments that make up these memories, some retained, others archived, and still others lost to oblivion. The thing about shared memories though is that the memories are cumulative – what one forgets, the other remembers. Further, the vantage points differ which makes for all the more interesting conversations, if only we went looking for it.

And so, I am hopeful the two sisters would share such a rich, inter-woven childhoods together. They would fight, play, read, eat, sleep, run, walk, fly together and in doing so, would weave tapestries in the fabric of shared memories.

We often read this book to Amara, our elder one. Not your typical kid’s book, this one is an aching reminder of the richness of life and an ode to the complexity of what constitutes a good life. To experience great joys, simple and innocent moments, to expand and to grow, to absorb and make amends with sorrow – everything that this life has to offer, has something achingly beautiful and haunting quality around it. The beauty is bound by the warmth of love and affection, the haunting nature is driven by the memories we create around our experiences. That all memories, whether happy or sad, are tied to our lives is a strong and powerful reminder of the things that life draws its meaning from. It’s also a reminder that our time here is short, shorter than we think and that our memories are capable of stretching this time span further, unbounded from the laws of natural world, our memories traverse eras and spaces and people even, long after they have left our lives.