(KP-13) Your Parents are not Ideal and Neither are YOU
How a blind woman operates a thriving online business | Making Sense with Sam Harris podcast | FOR WHAT BINDS US poem by Jane Hirshfield
Life Lesson
That your parents or relatives are humans first. Just because she is your mother doesn’t mean she will the most ideal person in this world. She will have flaws, those set of vices just like every human has.
So, don’t put your parents on high pedestal and treat them like demigods. They are as human as you are and they are as fallible to anger, jealousy, irritation as you are.
I expected too much from my mother. I expected my mother to be perfect - perfect in raising us, perfect in the role of a housewife, perfect as a teacher, perfect as a human being BUT she is NOT. And that’s only natural.
So, a lot of (bad or wrong) things for which I have held her responsible so far have become irrelevant to me now. It is not her fault, I have learned.
P.S: It was her birthday yesterday.
Positive Feel-Good Story
Geetha Saleesh, from Thrissur, Kerala, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare hereditary illness, when she was just 13 years old. By the age of 15, she had begun to lose her vision and was completely blind.
Her disability, on the other hand, never deterred her from reaching her objectives. Geetha, who had always desired a career, learned braille and completed her education. Geetha, who is now 39 years old, operates a thriving internet business that offers handmade food products such as ghee, pickles, and a turmeric-based superfood supplement.
In 2020, she and her spouse Saleesh Kumar founded 'Geetha's Home to Home.' "Being visually impaired never prevented me from starting something on my own. My spouse and children have always been supportive of me in all of my initiatives”
You can visit her website ‘GeethasFoods’ and order homemade food products and support her from the comfort of your home.
Books/Podcast/Video
This week I want to talk about a podcast run by Sam Harris. Sam Harris has a degree in Philosophy and Ph. D is Neuroscience.
I have been listening to him for a while now and he is making a lasting impact on me through his conversations with eminent psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and more.
He runs a full-fledged app called Waking Up and a podcast on Spotify called “Making Sense with Sam Harris”. I can not recommend this highly enough.
Quote/Poem
FOR WHAT BINDS US by Jane Hirshfield
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down —
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest —And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.