Category: The World

🕊️🍁 🦅 Hawkish Power? 🐦‍⬛🍁 🦅

As soon as I came home, the words rattled in me 

To capture the moments when joyous and noisy, turned to eerie and silent.

The terrifying sound of all the birds leaving at the same time

The fluttering of a thousand wings – away, away to safety.

The ecstatic beauty of standing under a tree 

With thousands of leaves fluttering gently down.

The ears pricking up with the joy of 

Listening to hundreds of little birds chittering above.

All gone with the arrival of one regal hawk

The birds all flew, while the hawk gawked.

Without the rustling of the birds

Even the leaves stopped falling.

Of what use was this power?

When there was no one to exert it on?

It was a show of power so instant, so terrifying and so alien to the beautiful wintry surroundings, that I shuddered in spite of myself.

My thoughts swirled with dictators and their absolute clawing for this kind of power. Do people in power not want a happy, joyous populace? I thought of the happy chittering and camaraderie of the birds from moments ago and stood under the tree not making any noise,  content to enjoy the sounds of life overhead. 

As I walked back home from this eerie setting, my mind wandered to all the fittings of power and its lure over mankind. It doesn’t look like it will abate. Countries continue to go to war, and though countries may win or lose, the people involved always only seem to lose – their trust, their security, their loved ones, their hopes, their peace.

 

 

On Writing

It is always fascinating to understand the process behind the craft. To everyone, the process is different, the resulting work is different, and maybe that is why everyone’s voice and stories are different. Though some things seem to be common enough: curiosity and observing people.

Haruki Murakami in his musings, Novelist as a Vocation, writes about his mental chest of drawers – a place in which he places relevant and irrelevant information to be extracted when he is writing a novel. Some of the remaining ideas are used in his essays he says but the rest are there for the taking.

The truth is that none of us can imagine the beautiful fierce power of our own imagination. Where will it take us, or what it can do for us if we wrestle with it long enough? Few of us get to find out and fewer get it out into the world. How are some authors able to create the Harry Potter universe, others write books that evoke such deep rooted emotions such as The Crane Husband? 

I was fascinated to read that  the idea struck the author of Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill, when she saw a crane land on a rooftop while she was driving through the countryside from somewhere to somewhere. What an evocative inspiration? 

I remember thinking of the book, every time I spotted a crane by the riverbank. The raw sadness of the tale stayed with me for days afterward.

cd3693d5-3eaa-4d3b-ab97-d7c865de8707

Such inspirations are not unheard of. A few days ago I read a folk tale about the Crane Wife, in the book,

Beneath the Moon, Tales, Myths, and Divine Stories From Around the World by Yoshitani, Yoshi

All of us have  a mental chest of drawers and some of us rely on it more than others, but those memories shape and define us in ways we do not realize. 

Murakami writes about his journey and how he stumbled upon the conviction that he wanted more than anything else to be a novelist at the age of 29. His journey was not one of writing obsessively throughout his childhood, but of simply deciding one day to become a writer.

He writes about how his formative years were fairly trauma free apart from a stint in college where there seems to have been unrest among the student community. He writes:

“I have never been comfortable in groups or in any kind of collective action with others, so I didn’t become a member of any student groups, but I did support the movement in a general sort of way.”

But as time went on, he realized that:

“Something criminally wrong had wormed its way into the movement. The positive power of imagination had been lost. I felt this strongly. As a result when the storm passed, we were left with the bitter taste of disappointment. Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren’t accompanied by moral power they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words,

Words have power.

Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from these principles.”

It was perhaps this realization that led him to lose faith in the movement and turn towards writing as a career when the epiphany hit him one day while watching a baseball game that he might be a novelist yet. 

I am sure a conviction as deep as that would find its way into his writing and if there are specific examples or suggestions of books regarding these, please let me know.

I remember a discussion in which it was mentioned that ‘You need war or love if you need a complete series.’

While that is true, the pursuit of truth, peace, justice, the power of words all seem to be good enough inspirations too.

Books:

  • Novelist as a Vocation – By Haruki Murakami
  • The Crane Husband – By Kelly Barnhill
  • Beneath the Moon – Fairy Tales, Myths and Divine Stories from Around the World – By Yoshi Yoshitani

🐙The 🐙🐙Kraken 🐙🐙Sleepeth🐙

I don’t know how many of you have heard of the Carta Marina: I hadn’t and was agog after reading about it. It is a fascinating geological map showing the mythical monsters in the oceans and where they are to be found. 

Completed by Olaus Magnus in Italy in the mid sixteenth century, it attempts to outline all the monsters known at the time in the Nordic regions from various accounts. 

In the book, The Underworld – Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean – By Susan Casey, she writes about the Carta Marina:

“On land the action is orderly: tiny figures are farming, hunting, skiing, playing the violin, By contrast, the ocean is in chaos, awash in dangers and tragedies, livid with waves and currents flowing, swirling, pooling, seething. Aid the tumult, twenty-five monsters make their appearance.”

  • Susan Casey – The Underworld – Journeys to the Depths f the Ocean

I may have mentioned several times in these archives that the daughter is a mermaid born to human parents. Which is to say the endless fascination with the oceans, and natant joys of reveling in the waters are things we all enjoy. 

After reading about the Carta Marina, I went looking for the Kraken picture. When you browse through the daughter’s artwork, there are quite a few aquatic themed paintings. This one – it is Kraken – the mythical creature that is spoken of with awe among the nautical elite. I must admit I am endlessly fascinated with octopii, squid and I suppose the kraken  as well.

octopus

Dictionary.com summarizes this perfectly: https://www.dictionary.com/e/squid-vs-octopus/

In summary, if you see a sea creature with eight sucker-covered arms and a round shape, that’s an octopus. But if it’s got a long, thin, triangular shape and 10 limbs—eight arms and two tentacles—it’s a squid. If you see it swallowing a ship, it’s a kraken.

Sea-faring must have been a difficult vocation as most vocations in humankinds’ past seems to have been, but it also provided the richest tales of adventure and mystique to those whose fortunes or destinies never allowed them to leave the small square footage they’d been born and raised in. 

Screenshot 2023-11-13 at 6.48.32 PM

Even now, as we set out sights on interplanetary travels, I find the deep allure of the deeps as fascinating as ever.  Would we see into the eyes of a greenland shark that is rumoured to live on for 350 years or be pulled into the clutches of the mythical Kraken? Or be dumbfounded in the noises of the monster that rises out of the depths of the ocean in the FogHorn – By Ray BradBury (I believe the book is out of print – but I can never truly forget that feeling of deep awe and fear as the monster rears towards the lighthouse thinking it’s being called by a mate. I felt a strange sense of loneliness for the last monster standing the night I read it as a teenager)

As Sylvia Earle says, “Looking into the eyes of a wild dolphin – who is looking into mine-inspires me to learn everything I can about them and do everything I can to take care of them…You can’t care if you don’t know.”

I looked at the picture, and remembered the poem by Lord Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, invaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

References:

  • Life in the Ocean – the Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle – by Claira A Nivola
  • The Underworld – Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean – By Susan Casey
  • The Carta Marina – The map of monsters 16th Century – By Magnus
  • The FogHorn – by Ray Bradbury

The Past, Present and Future of Jobs

“So, you work at a job that essentially takes away your own job?”, said the son.This is the kind of meta stuff that he finds exciting.

The Thanksgiving week-end was rife with conversations about the corporate drama that in yester years could be equated to the coups of thrones. Would the CEO go? Would the Board of Governors go? Would they both go? Who would be their replacement?

Last year the world popped their popcorns and watched the unfolding drama of an unraveling Twitter with Elon Musk and his hostile takeover of the company, now rechristened X, though the URL still points to twitter.com because the TFE team was probably let go.

This year, it seems much of the dramatic action came from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. In modern day Wall Street wars, CEOs, (or C-Staff) and the Boards of companies provide for much of the action. Will the market hold? Will the Sensex drop?

What happens to the interest rates?

One of our friends was explaining to the children about their own roles – technical roles in which they enable AI to be utilized intelligently. One was working on images, another on code frameworks itself. A niece who was majoring in biology told me how they were already being encouraged to use ChatGPT to generate code for them. They only needed to see the results of the datasets fed into the model.

age_of_ai

Fascinating as it all was, I was left musing on the future of work. It seems a rather recurring theme of late. There are image generators to replace artists, code generators for software engineers, of course plenty of writing that can be replaced with intelligent prompting. So, why not the design and maintenance of these systems too?

I picked up the book from my recent library pile:

The Worst Children’s Job in History – Sir Tony Robinson

worst_jobs

The book was truly horrific and true. If anyone was wondering about the future of jobs and feeling glum, they could actually be grateful that the past nature of our jobs are well behind us.

Every job not only held misery, but a generous helping of walloping, not enough food, abysmal conditions, no thought for safety etc. Compared to those jobs, the present day conditions of occupying ourselves and our children seems fantastic. I only hope this trend continues for, our current nature of jobs is about to upended again.

It seems with the speed of technological challenges, the cycles with which our jobs are upended seems to be quicker and quicker.

A couple of generations ago, seamstresses, tailors, knitters, bat makers, ball makers, farmers, equipment handlers all saw their jobs upended by mechanization.

Then the next generation saw people’s fortunes needing more specialized skillsets such as coding, scientific knowledge etc.

Recently, call center jobs, desk phones, phones that were in the family room all went away, to be replaced by cell phones. Those of us who remember having to take a friend’s call in the living room with three uncles, five aunts, three cousins of varying age and maturity levels, two grandparents and a maid, will forever envy the children of today who quietly buzz out of vicinity taking their phone calls mysteriously with them. 

The next wave of AI seems to be disrupting industries that I’d hoped would not be. Creative industries that are already hard to make a living in: storytelling, image generation, writing, etc

Will our grandchildren read books about us in this era and feel sorry for us that we had to slave in front of our computers all day long to accomplish certain things, spend days getting tests done in medical labs to determine what was the matter with us?

What would the future of our jobs look like?

More importantly, in this quest for bettering the use of our time, do we hope to become at peace with who we are without being defined by what occupies our time? If so, maybe we should start equipping ourselves towards that, shouldn’t we?

Let me know your thoughts.

Books:

  • The Worst Children’s Jobs in History – Sir Tony Robinson
  • The Age of AI – Henry Kissinger

🍁I Found A 🍁🍁Million🍁🍁 Bucks 🍁

“It rained last night, did you hear?” the son said the first thing in the morning as he crept groggily downstairs. 

I confessed I hadn’t. It had been a late night – one fraught with beeping alarms, low-battery carbon monoxide filters, very cold temperatures, and a spate of international phone calls. I remember peeking out at the full-ish moon before finally collapsing into a warm bed, but not much else.  In fact when the alarm went off in the morning, I was in the midst of a strange and confusing dream in which somebody was giving me a recipe. I can’t remember the details, but I also remember my first thought being – what a strange recipe!

Luckily I shook all memories of frog chutneys and slime pickles aside and made for the open air. The air was fresh – the Earth beautiful after the rains, and I was not going to miss it.

I was rewarded with brilliant cloudy skies, rain-drop topped leaves, and quiet birds shaking their wings and beaks throughout. 

I stopped to marvel at the casual beauty that lay there in front of me – the lake not realizing the perfect reflection it provided to the mountains in the distance, the fall trees closer by, and the still groggy white heron on the opposite shore. All just there for anyone wanting to see it. Sleepy, dewy, cloudy, misty. 

fall-COLLAGE

I stood there trying to remember the chemical names that were responsible for the brilliance of the colours reflected before me: carotenids, anthocyanins and tannins. I wondered at the wisdom of these trees: realizing that it was time to stop photosynthesis and let the tannins and cyanins or whatever take over without any fanfare, and producing the most breath-taking show for the world to revel in. 

🍁Carotenids : the pigments for the orange and yellow colors

🍁Anthocyanins: the pigments that are responsible for the purples and reds.

🍁Tannins: responsible for the brown color.

Almost instinctively, I looked around and found myself alone. Alone in a bustling suburban area – the only one who took a quick detour and stopped to admire the lake on my way from somewhere to somewhere. It felt nice. Special. Like I had won a million bucks.

November is already on its way out – 2023 is already on its way out. The trees have put their show on, on time. I gave myself a little scolding: My Christmas tree was not up yet.  “But I did have some beautiful poinsetta plants beaming their reds at me in the morning, that was something! “ I said to myself heading to a small park bench, and there: I found a million bucks. 

img_8614img_8615

I left it there for the next lucky person to find, and went on my way, a smile playing on my lips.

Who said the universe did not have a sense of humor?

The Light of Being

The evenings have been drawing in earlier and earlier. As if the natural tilt of the axis weren’t enough, there was a time change thrown in. The result is that my evening walk is in the company of the glittering stars, and I am grateful for these little reminders of light – as far away as they may be. 

One evening I found myself thinking of this and that on my evening walk. The stars twinkled above, the leaves crunched below. Though I could not make out the colors just then, I could imagine them well enough in my mind’s eyes – bright reds, yellows, deep maroons. 

Californian Novembers are magical indeed. 

IMG_0506

Where our northern or eastern counterparts would already be bracing for the winters, our autumn cloaks are just getting started. Our gingkos have only just donned their beautiful cloaks of buttery mellow yellow, the maples and oaks, their swirling cloaks of ruby reds, and thick velvety ones of deep maroon. I wondered when the cold would start and looked up at the stars instinctively. 

Albus Dumbledore seemed to wink at me through the stars: 

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

– Dumbledore in the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 

I swished on for a bit pondering.

Deep in the epipelagic layers of the ocean, there are creatures who have taken this to heart. In the twilight zone, the only light they have is their own. How must that feel to them? The deepest darkest nooks and crannies of an unforgiving ocean made accessible only through their own bioluminescence. 

IMG_2457-COLLAGE

In one fell arc bypassing lands and atmospheres, the stars and the bioluminescent life in the oceans seem to share a Light of Being. 

What are our sources for finding the light in ourselves – the means of switching on the inner lights? Good friends, warm meals, bracing walks in nature, the finest ideas in literature, art and music. Hygge. A halo that reflects the warmth and light within, in the harshest of winters, and the coolest of springs? If only we could all cast our own little patronus.

img_4883

Books: 

🤕 Boo-Boos 🤕

Do you know when you start to feel your age? 

An innocuous question popped up on my browsing sites. Really, sometimes I wish these systems weren’t omniscient. I might’ve searched up the best way to dress a flesh wound, but did that mean you use my demographics, cross-reference it with my potentially weak hips thanks to my age, and wrangle up half-baked questions and answers on when you actually start to feel your age?!

Preposterous.

If only someone would sue the internet for this nonsense. 

I feel fine. 

So what if I am slightly wobbly while descending the stairs after a fall two days afterward? It is perfectly normal isn’t it? I mean I am not a teenager anymore or in my twenties or in the decade after that for that matter. But so what?

A children’s book I’d picked up a few days ago from the library beamed up at me. Books: Ever the saviors I tell you.

The Boo-Boos That Changed the World: A True Story About an Accidental Invention (Really!) by Barry Wittenstein and Chris Hsu 

boo-boos

The book is about a man, Earle Dickson, whose wife gets a lot of boo-boos. While a competent enough person with dressing of wounds and such, she is also aware of how hard it is to take care of wrapping the bandages and cutting the reels of cotton etc by herself, especially if one of the hands are injured. 

Thus was born the handy Band-Aid. Husband and wife worked on the design together and pitched the idea.

Luckily Dickson also works for Johnson & Johnson – the business that could take up an idea for boo-boo betterment. 

Despite the brilliance of the idea, it did not take off as easily. People still seemed to prefer the old-fashioned way of tending to their injuries. That’s when they hit upon the idea of Boy Scouts of America – a place where folks regularly hurt themselves, and wanted to get back to having a marvelous time as quickly as they could. (Children! The best boo-boo handlers in the whole world. I remember glorious years in which scraped knees and elbows meant nothing, other than a dusting off before running that next race to the eucalyptus tree down by the road. )

That did it. As Boy Scouts embraced Band-Aid, so did the rest of the nation. I beamed up at the son, who is a proud Boy Scout and had helped me with immediate first-aid with the boo-boo.

He then ordered some first-aid supplies off Amazon, and the site flashed that it would be available at my doorstep in a couple of hours time. We looked at each other, and said, “Wow! We are spoiled brats huh?! We just wait for it at home and peel-and-stick.”

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557760/the-boo-boos-that-changed-the-world-by-barry-wittenstein-author-chris-hsu-illustrator/

I stared back at the browsing link being recommended to me: So, when do you start to feel your age?

👻 Maybe when you realize that getting a boo-boo and taking off soon after is harder. 

🤕 Maybe it is when you groan your way downstairs from a simple boo-boo from days earlier. 

😈 Maybe it is when you yearn for that beautiful moment just before the boo-boo.

👻🎃 I Am Hopeful Because 👻🎃

I sat on All Hallows Eve bathed in an orange glow, marking and judging entries for a literature contest. If ever there was a content pumpkin contest, there I was, readymade. It was quite an enjoyable task, and I sat quietly reading stories, poems and essays on the topic, “I Am Hopeful Because”. 

Throughout the evening, I waddled out of my desk to open the door and bellowed, “Who dared to ring the bell? Ho ho ho!”. I thought I was doing pretty well till the son asked me why Santa was ho-ho-ho-ing on Halloween. Oh well!

Halloween is one of my favorite American festivals.  The house was reasonably well decorated. Pretty soon, penguins, vampires, mermaids, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all come knocking on the door despite the ominous sign by the door that read, “Knock if you dare!”.

img_8351

 The son and his friends had a roaring Candy Exchange Business going on the side I understood later. He came into the house looking flushed from the cold, and bursting with news. Apparently, he’d been able to auction a Kit-Kat for 2 Twix, a Ghirardelli white chocolate piece, and an M&M packet. He also had instituted a monopoly on all the Sour Patch Candy, and found himself bartering and trading like the fellows on the stock exchange. I smiled. 

“How was your evening?” he asked. It had been one of those rare Halloween evenings when I had stayed put inside the home instead of gallivanting with the revelers. I love the atmosphere of Halloween as regular readers know, but this time a minor biking accident had me sitting inside, while the Halloween revelers roamed the candy laden streets. They mapped best routes, best homes to hit for the best candies resulting in rounds of discussion. It was all marvelous.

img_8259

I did miss the magic of the halloween streets with moonlight filtering through the clouds, black cats slinking through the streets, raccoons wondering what all the fuss was about, and chattering children racing towards lit up porches for some Halloween candy. But it was also a surreal, beautiful evening. A reminder of the joys of winter evenings, of warmth drawing in as the evenings became colder. That first feeling of Hygge. 

I told him that I was hopeful because the evening was full of well-behaved children. The children all seemed to be so happy to receive a piece of candy, even though they all live in an economy and a community where far too much sugar is available for consumption. One or two of them even returned a couple of pieces of candy when they’d had a few more than they thought they wanted. 

The sweet honesty of these children in times when we are constantly reminded of our flaws and failures was refreshing, and the gentle interactions through the evening with adults and children alike, was very pleasant indeed.

halloween_ij

“We’re all mad here.”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

25 years on?

On a whim one week-end night we watched the Kung Fu Panda – 3 movie. This movie, in my mind, was a stroke of genius with respect to the storyline. All three Kung Fu Panda movies are brilliant when it comes to storyline, characters and humour. But this one was sublime in the way it helped us understand why Oogway stood by his decision of choosing Po – the panda, to be the Dragon Warrior, when he accidentally fell out of the sky as the choice for Dragon Warrior was being made. 

  • The first movie: Po destined to be the Dragon Warrior
  • The second movie: Po, the Dragon Warrior’s, background – where he came from, what happened?
  • The third movie: explains why Oogway the turtle stood by his decision to choose Po as the Dragon Warrior.

In the third movie, a villain, Kai, is wrecking the spirit realm so he can come back and drink the Chi (life force) from the major characters. He manages to come back to the physical realm and is shocked to see that nobody remembers him, but many seem to remember his arch nemesis, Oogway the Turtle. Well, Kai had died 500 years ago – so it was quite obvious that people had forgotten him, but what we were discussing is not that people had forgotten Kai, but how Kai managed to find his way around at all. 

Screenshot 2023-10-24 at 4.16.05 PM

If someone were to fall asleep and wake up 25 years later, it would be hugely disconcerting. Think of all the things that have changed just in the past 25 years:

  • People now walk around with cell-phones – the equivalent of magic wands in fantasy stories these days. 25 years from now, people will wonder how folks in our generation ever got anything done without aid from these devices. We can’t seem to navigate to our destinations, talk to our dear ones,  or create images and thereby memories without our precious devices. 
  • The usage of the internet in the past 25 years. In many ways, our generation of software engineers crested the wave with the rising innovations in this space – search engines, email, chat, video conferencing, news channels, social media, streaming entertainment. If somebody went to sleep in 1990 and got up in 2025, it would be hugely disconcerting.
  • Rising economic fortunes mean that travel has become more achievable and adventures await more of us at every turn.
  • Reading has evolved – After maybe 500 years of only having the physical book, the Kindle paved the way for e-reading. The Internet opened doors for all types of reading: short bursts, medium posts, long articles. 
  • Entertainment – the kinds of entertainment itself has evolved so drastically. Streaming channels, live TV, YouTube videos, Twitch, online gaming
  • Payment methods: Where previously we needed access to banknotes as cash, we have gone to increasingly easier and secure methods of payment transactions. From high-end stores in New York to street vendors in rural India, the money language has evolved too.  

“Maybe human-beings are like frogs in water with respect to technology – slowly exposed to increasingly higher levels of complexity and we just adapted. Babies and children are truly amazing- imagine their learning curve!”, I said and we laughed.

Maybe Kai was going about it all wrong, we said after discussing some of this. Kai should’ve come back to Earth 500 years after Oogway had died and then, he’d have realized that nobody remembered Oogway either. More importantly, how did it matter whether anyone remembered you or not 500 years from now? You wouldn’t be here to know – you’d be partying in the spirit realm, wouldn’t you?

What are your guesses on how life would look 25 years from now?

Successful Transitions

Reminders of time passing are all around us. It is there in the first drizzle of October nights, in the nippy mists of November mornings, and the frigid temperatures of the freezing winter months, as much as it is in the growth of hope and new leaves in spring.

IMG_7697-COLLAGEYet, even after a few years of these cycles, we still do not comprehend the effects of time as effectively as when we see those around us age, or loved ones lose their vigor. It has been a hard lesson and one everyone goes through in life. But the past few trips to India have really brought this to us with increasing clarity and sadness. Sadness, not for the coming of the inevitable, but for our own reluctance in accepting it.

It is hard seeing once vibrant aunts and uncle lose their vigor and charm. Precious few hold on to their good graces as they age. Many lapse into complaining about their lot. Still others, refuse to accept their diminishing physical prowess, and insist on being in-charge even in situations where they are clearly past it.

What will our folly be?

The more I saw of the aging and the elderly, the more I wonder whether there is an easy way for us to move towards acceptance. I understand first-hand the shock of it. I remember thinking with shock when my daughter’s friends called me ‘Aunty’ for the first time all those years ago. When had I become an ‘aunty’? But now, I love it when the friends of my children call me ‘Aunty’ – it is a word that fills me with joy.

This is also a reason I find myself attracted to books by authors like Miss Read. (Jacqueline Winspear was recommended to me recently and I like the style and wisdom in her writings as well). Fictional and functional characters such as Miss Clare and Mma Ramotswe of the No 1 Detective Agency come to mind. They bring to life the kind of people we admired through our childhoods: normal people living life with grace, common sense and love for those around them. It is comforting to read that practicing these apparently simple tenets lead to a good life.

As I read the essay on psychosocial intelligence in the book: Putting the Science in Fiction – Collated by Dan Koboldt , I could not help nodding along at the bits of writing related to our lifespans as outlined by the essayist Maria Grace. Maria Grace is a psychologist and a curious observer of the human condition. In it, she says that

🍀”Psychosocial development encompasses the changes in an individual as they manage various societal expectations across the lifespan.”

While there are many books that guide us through adolescence (now more than before) , I am constantly looking for good books that guide us through the middle and later stages of our lives. There are always philosophical works – the wisdom of humankind through the ages distilled in our myths, fairy-tales, vedas, religious texts, fables and epics. Philosophers such as Seneca, Aristotle and Buddha who have given us a peek. 

When we are children, we rarely understand what adults mean when they say childhood is far easier. I don’t think I ascribe to that theory. Those of us lucky enough to have people looking after us certainly have things to be grateful for, but adolescence is also a period of great uncertainty and angst.

However, I understand now what teachers and parental figures meant when  they said childhood was easier, for adulthood brings with it a whole host of different challenges. The expectations of our roles in society, the ability to care for different generations – older parents, our siblings, colleagues and peers, and younger children ( our own, niblings, friends children, those in our care).

🍀”In addition to the tasks of preparing older progeny for launch into the world and managing the increasing needs of older parents, individuals at this stage of the lifespan are also expected to step into social leadership roles. A commitment to lifelong learning and growth marks a positive resolution to this stage, whereas Ebenezer Scrooge-like preoccupation with self and comfort mark an unsuccessful one.”

As I read on to the late adulthood sections of the essay, specifically, navigating the travails of old age and its associated ailments. She goes onto say:

🍀“Those who manage this transition (late adulthood) successfully do so by recognizing the worth of their previous and continued contributions to their society and future generations. Depression, despair and giving up mark unsuccessful transitions.”

I have yet to read any books by Maria Grace, but her essay on psychosocial development in the Putting Science in Fiction book is an excellent one. (Essay: Character Development Beyond Personality Quirks)

science_in_fiction