An Open Letter to MYSELF

An Open Letter to MYSELF !!

From 25 year old me to 50 year old me.
Hi Jaini,

This obviously applies If I am still alive and reading it.

WOW you made it. You went through all these years and made it to your half century. Consider yourself a lucky women. And if you have relatively good health, a roof, a fridge full of food and a family to love you just proved that you made it through the rough times. Maybe when you are reading this at 50 you may be laughing and saying to yourself what was I thinking writing this letter to myself. Life must be completely different for you right now, you probably don’t remember how you were when you were 25, and so let me take you down to a journey to your twenties. Your early twenties were tough, maybe not compared to what you must have seen so far but they were the toughest you had seen thus far.

At 22 you graduated from your bachelors, big deal. But it all came crumpling down when you couldn’t land a job in the next coming months. You worked minimum paid job, cleaned shit of clients and got punched and knives thrown at you. But hey, you took it as a challenge and understood that if you are going to be a behaviour analyst you got to take the shit. You came out of that and then you landed your first professional job but the only problem was it was thousands of miles away from family. For someone who had never travelled alone, to move to a foreign land without any support at such an age is tough. It meant to leave behind the only family that you had, the few people you loved, your friends behind, and the place you called home from the past ten years. It was probably the toughest decision you had to make at that point in life but you had promised yourself that no matter what the obstacle you will take it to make it big in your career. When you got to the foreign land, everything changed from your weather, to your comfort, your peers and your lifestyle. You were sleeping on the bare floor with just a blanket for 6 months, you were travelling in -55 degree Celsius on the bus waiting outside for it sometimes to a stretch of an hour. The only one to call friend was your phone and the television. You went to the theatre on your own on your bday to celebrate it. You finally realized what it meant for thousands of people when they migrated to different places to better their lives, just like your parents did, to give you the life you have. The distance between your parents and you made you even closer. The friends you took for granted to be around all of sudden became the greatest gift.

Apart from the obvious hardships, you also realized that the career wasn’t for you. You liked the bits and pieces of the career but you weren’t truly living your potential and you decided to go back to family and figure yourself out. This was the exciting part, being reunited with the ones you love. But you didn’t know that you were about to embark on the worst year so far. You got back with a hope to further your study, and meanwhile continuing working towards slowly shifting your career. Trying to change your career is never an easy route. You must have applied to hundreds of jobs, oh how dreadful that was. You didn’t even get a response, let alone rejections. You had set out goals for yourself, and you were getting disappointed as days passed by without any of them being even close to completion.

Tired and frustrated you started lashing on the same people that you claimed to love so much. But as someone who had been in the field of psychology for so long you knew that the changes were happening and to deal with it you started a completely different course. You had nothing to do with it, but you knew that while you searched for jobs and applied for masters you had to do something or else you would definitely go crazy. This new course gave you a sense of achievement because you were able to meet people from different walks of life and having passed through the same troubles as you were. You didn’t feel as distraught as you had before because you found that you were not alone. As you are writing this you are coming to an end of this course, and you have finished applying for masters, and you are working part time with an offer waiting for you once you graduate that may lead you to your desired career path.

This was just the beginning of your career and now on to your personal life. Being from an Indian descent you knew early on that if you didn’t find yourself a partner someone else for sure will. I am sure you remember ALL the pieces of art work you had to meet and go through before you landed on the one you did (I hope you have someone, If not I guess all of them turned out to be pieces of abstract art work). It was hard for you to have a current mind set where you wanted to know someone for a long time, fall in love and then get married as supposed to your parents wanting you to meet three times and boom you are engaged. You constantly had to fight with them to make them come in the middle. You met some really amazing guys who were perfect for you theoretically but god damn it they did nothing for your heart to pump. Then you met some that my god all everything was just red flags but you were swooned by them temporarily. And then there were ones that everything was perfect but the time just didn’t work out. You were getting frustrated with this process as time lapsed, pressure built and “biological” clock started kicking. But one day you realized that hey who the hell cares. When it is meant to happen it will. Keep meeting the douchebags, the bad boys , the nerds, the commitment phobic, the creeps, but one day if it’s meant to work out you will end up with your own weirdo that fits in with your weird life and you shall call it a true find ;).

This was your life at 25. I don’t know if your life is any better now, but what the 25 year old Jaini had figured out was that no matter what happened in her life, she had her family and her friends right where she wanted them. She had her confidence that she will do ok, everything will be fine just as the bad times came so will the good. She learnt that the greatest gift of time is letting go.



So if you are stressing right now, let it go. Live and enjoy what you have right now. The clock will turn around and you will find happiness, and if you are really happy right now enjoy it to the utmost gratefulness.



And more than anything keep respecting yourself, and love yourself.

Your own reflection,

Jaini from 2015

I had a DREAM !!

I had a DREAM !!

We all have dreams, some we remember and some we don’t. I particular have this gift sometimes not so much of a gift that I have elaborate dreams and then I seem to vividly remember them.  A couple of nights ago I had such a dream.  In this dream I had gone camping with a lot of random people, I seem to have made new friends in my dream. While camping with my new found friends we decided to go for a walk in the woods, and while walking we come across this pond/lake, as I am lacking of that particular detail let’s say it was a body of water. So we all go to the shore of the water body and look into it. The water seemed opaque, but this wasn't the odd part. Whenever any of us looked into the water, instead of seeing our reflections we saw a series of images passing by us.  When looked closely it seemed to be images from our past being reflected back to us. All of us in awe couldn't believe what our eyes were seeing. But the image we saw was our very recent past. So we were very familiar with it. One of my adventurous friends decided to take a leap into the water and tread it deeper. Though in real life I believe being a pessimist I would have stopped him from doing such a thing. I decided otherwise in my dream, I encouraged him to take that leap. As he tread through the water deeper, he began to get excited and kept on going deeper. But he seemed to be so excited to tell us what he saw that he came back out.  He told us that as he tread deeper into the water he was able to see more images from his past, the deeper he went the more he saw, but he said something else to. According to him as he swam further into the water, it seem to get slimier, he wasn't able to swim well as he went further. One of my other dream friends not believing this decided to tread deeper. And this time she swam deep enough that we saw her struggling to come a float.   At this point all of us got worried and through the help of a large stick tried to pull her out of the water. Panicking and almost breathless she said she thought she would be stuck in the water forever. Of course after this incident none of my adventurous friends decide to go anywhere near the water.

I finally awoke from this elaborate dream. Waking up from it, I began to have a really eerie feeling. I wondered what this dream could possibly mean. Though it’s not necessary that your dreams have to have a meaning, but I decided to learn from this particular one.   From this dream though, I learnt that one should always peep into the past, just to stay connected to a piece of us. But don’t keep going back to it, and start living in the past. Because the further you go into the past, the harder it will become for you to look ahead, and you will be stuck there, and it will become impossible to pull you out of that trance.

“Peep into your past, live in your present, and build your future”

Hope you like it!

Skeptical Self 

Unexpected

As it has been clear that I have been inactive for the last couple of months, so in this I have broken a promise to myself of writing a blog every month. I won't really justify the reasons to why I have not been able to write one but I had a huge writers block. I don't know if its gone completely yet, but its an attempt to write one because a few of you have requested that I write something. 

The biggest adventure for me these months was travelling to India. After eleven long years of being privileged to live in a great nation like Canada I had the opportunity to dig up my roots again. As I landed. I saw a swamp of people waiting outside the airport, probably more than the people that actually landed. In that instant I realized I landed in a place with not only greater population by numbers but by hearts. A place where greeting a person comes a whole family. Among the crowd I was trying to find my familiar face. My family that I left behind so long ago that the faces that I remember were young full of life. Forgetting that years had passed by, and what I was searching for now was older,  and a little more grayer. I greeted my family with tears of joy in my eyes, or it could be the heat and pollution but I would like to this it was joy.  

This country is divided in two segments, one side where the roads are smoother than any other nations, and the others where you still have to walk with obstacles. One where there are homes touching the sky and others where the ground is all they have. There is noise, there is pollution, and no one has any traffic sense what so ever. You would think there would be numerous accidents and ridiculous stress in this country. In my entire month there I saw two accidents, while in a developed countries I have been to I have seen 2 accidents probably a day. 

I promise I am getting to a point with these short blobs of mine. 

My entire trip to India  if I had to describe in a word would be unexpected. 

Past two months of my life have been unexpected. In these two months I have discovered every emotion there is a human can possibly feel. I have felt excited yet extremely stationary, Love and disgust, extreme joy and extreme sorrows. Just how India is, and being there made me realize that we all have our own world where everything exists, the matter is just the revelations of those parts of your world. India is a chaotic country, but still people have balanced there individual life in this chaos. They drive with absolute zero traffic sense, but they know how to avoid messes, they have learnt to communicate with the chaos. They suffer from insufficient water, drainage, and in general hygiene. They have learnt to work around it.  Similarly in our lives we have chaos called emotions. We have love with hate, happy with sad, anger with patience, etc. We just need to learn to manage the chaos, learn to work around it, expect that with time there will be more coming your way and you just got to smile and take it as it is. This is a lesson to be learnt from people who have way less materialistically then we do. Inner peace can never be achieved from the things outside. True joy of life is to smile in the sorrows and rise in the fallings. It taught me that I stress about the low internet speed, and not having an office job, to water being colder than usual one of the days, and snow not being shoveled on time. Things that will be solved eventually stresses me out leaving a permanent damage on my mental peace. So India's chaos taught me to calm down, enjoy every moment in my life and no matter if there is a tomorrow or not, stop and enjoy today.  My family had aged from when I saw them last, but only the exterior, the youthfullness was still exuberant, yet I became 10 years older than my age, the stresses in my life that haven't even begun yet started affecting me, and that aged me faster. 

So the people of this world, "slow down, take a deep breathe and say everything will be okay eventually, whenever eventually maybe but till then I am smiling in my sorrows and rising in my falls"

Hope you like this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. The chaos in my writing shall eventually make sense to all of you.

Skeptical Self :)

Magnificent Tree!!!

I know I always continue to say in all of my posts that it was extremely difficult to write one, similarly I shall save you the trouble of reading it again. But this time my inspiration for this blog was derived from my walk in the hallways of my university. Four years I walked those hallways every day, and believe you me it’s a long time for someone to realize what the painting was trying to convey. That painting hangs where we enter the university leading towards our classes. I remember seeing it the first time, and I laughed at it because it clearly looked like it was hanging upside down. Then after looking at it for a couple of more minutes it intrigued me, and then I concluded that it was abstract modern art trying to convey something useless that I have no time to think about. 

After approximately two years post-graduation I was visiting my university, and as usually I glances at it and walked passed it. But this time around I found myself looking back and turning around towards the painting. I wasn't consciously doing so until I once again stood in front of it starring at its face. Blankly looking at it while a rush of students, old and new passed by me and probably getting irritated that I was blocking their way from quickly trying to reach their classes. This time around I truly understood why that painting hangs in the entrance of the university, I truly (well at least I think)  know that meaning of that painting in our lives.  The painting is a huge leafless tree and a house in the background, but the interesting part of painting is that it’s upside down. The trunks of the tree are at the top and the branches at the bottom. 

Its seems like a simple portrait of a tree, it’s the simplicity of this painting is what makes its so magnificent. To begin with the tree’s roots are at the top and branches at the bottom. This in general is indicative of how we learn throughout our lives. We learn the simply rules, basics of life at first. The superficial knowledge is as fragile as branches, it seems beautifully simple as leaves, but as you grow older and go more in-depth of the field the true sources subside. You learn depths (roots) of the topic. Which is usually very uninteresting and dry, just like the roots of a tree, but we all know without it there will be no tree. But most importantly what is interesting about this painting is, that doesn’t matter how hard I tried looking at the painting with a straight head, I always ended up tilting my head to look at the tree in the upright position.  This is the exact replication of life. Until our heads are a little tilted, until we strain our necks, until we look at the view from a different perspective we never see the true solution to the problems that we face.

So after a long journey through university, I truly realized that the purpose of an University is to teach us how to look a the same problem that we have been facing from a while in a different perspective. So don’t be afraid to strain you necks a little if the fruit is finding the solution you have been looking for.


The Magnificent tree !! 

Your's truly,

Skeptical Self 

A PEN IT IS

This is my third attempt of writing the blog for this month. I just don’t seem to get around writing something that is intriguing and I believe then came my “eureka” moment. I was scribbling with my pen and then I made a mistake and tried to scratch it as much as I can so it was no longer visible. The harder I tried to scratch it out the more indenting it got and started ripping through the paper. I suppose you may know where I might be going with this analogy.

Back tracking my story to when I was a wee little kid extremely excited to learn how to inscribe words beautifully with an ink pen I didn’t think that there were going to be ramification of me being able to use this beautiful thing. I was just learning how to use the instrument so the importance of holding it never occurred to me. When I had a pencil my life seemed dull, black and white while the ones who held a pen, colourful and vibrant. But now that I am all grown up I understand that as kids why we are not allowed to use pen (it could be that kids put everything in their mouth and might get intoxicated by the ink). It’s because a pencil always comes with an eraser.  Eraser means that no matter what mistake you make in life you are able to track back and restart. This privilege no longer prevails when you use a pen. Yes it’s beautiful, and Yes it looks vibrant, but once you make a mistake with a pen it’s there forever.  You may scratch it, you may try the so called ink erasers ( and let me tell you those erasers are crap !), but still the mark will always remain. Children, as they say in psychology are table a rasa (a clean slate). They are still learning our world’s way, they need that privilege to erase their mistake and learn new things while when we start growing up such opportunities no longer exist. We are held liable to what we do and we are expected to learn from our mistakes, and more importantly NEVER to repeat the same ones.

This is exactly where the negative trait of a pen comes in handy. If one uses a pencil to write and makes a mistake you are able to erase it this can easily forget the mistake that was initially made and very easily repeat it. But with a pen you can merely scratch it out or make is foggy, but you are always able to look back and remind yourself that you are never to repeat the same mistake twice.  This serves a purpose in our lives, it lets us save time, and it helps us always stay grounded and reminds us how far we came since we started.  Trying to scratch your mistakes won’t help, anyone who has used a pen must know that scratching rips the paper.  Similarly trying extremely hard to undo your mistake harms you, drags you in your past, thus not letting you move forward and achieve things.

So use your pen wisely, think before you inscribe, and if you make a mistake just cross it out and move forward but no matter what happens keep inscribing. One should only stop when they cease to exist.  It might seem like a big deal when it’s made, but in the grand scheme of your life it will just seem like a little mark that defines your long and beautifully vibrant journey.

“Life is like those cool multicoloured pens, in one click you are sad, then angry, and then beautifully green.” – Jaini

A pleasant experience

For this month I had so much to share, it was a battle between the experiences this summer and a strangely pleasant experience I had yesterday while walking home. So I ended up choosing my rather pleasant experience.

Yesterday after an exhausting day at work, and by exhausting I mean running after 8 clients who have various developmental challenges. It was straining and draining. I decided that doesn’t matter how tired I am, it’s Friday and I need to be happy. So when I got out of the bus I had my headphones on and I spotted a pinecone. It was half broken and swooshed yet something about it intrigued me. I decided to play little soccer game with it and started tossing it forward and back with my foot while I walked. Initially it kept me entertained but there came a point where I wanted to abandon the pinecone and just walk straight home. But I took it as a challenge to take this piece of pine cone directly to my house. Doing so meant that my travel will take twice its time because it was really hard to maneuver such a small piece of object with my feet.  So I kicked and kicked, it got frustrating and tiring, people passing by stared at me strangely, a few laughed, and believe it or not a few even stopped pointed and laughed. At the stop light when I picked up the pine cone crossed the road and threw it on the side walk and once again started kicking, people started peeping out of their cars to stare at what was so important to me that I picked up and then laughed when they saw what it really was. Through this journey with my pine cone I realized that life is a resemblance of this one single experience of mine.  That piece of pine cone, no matter how small and worthless it looked it was still something I aspired for so it was my goal/dream. To others it was worthless, stupid and a sense of mockery. So when we walk the path of life with our own dreams with a vision of our finish line we will meet a lot of people in our lives that will laugh at us for having such a goal, might even intimidate us to stop our paths and change our ways but we must keep on moving. Because the way we saw our end goal, the way we envisioned our lives is not the way they see it. Our dreams are our own creation, and there will come a point where it will become close to impossible for you to continue any longer, you will start questioning your choices. In no ways is it bad to analyze and refurbish your dreams but never change its coarse because you think it’s taking too long or it’s something you cannot and should not aspire. Believe me a small goal like getting the pine cone home made me the happiest girl in the block. It was so uplifting because I finished what I had started.

From this extremely strange yet uplifting experience I have learned that life is about patience, it’s about believing in your dreams and it’s about moving forward no matter what the obstacle.

“Dream like you have forever to achieve it, strive for it like you have today”

Hope you enjoy it !!..If you like it that is :)

Skeptical Self :)

Our past

I didn't know that when I was committing to write a new blog every month I was going to have such a hard time trying to come up with a topic. Its not that I don't have things to talk about, believe me there is a LOT of things. But its difficult to put into a coherent thought format and make it sound interesting.
Since it is the last day of the month I have no choice but to squeeze in this piece of writing today.


“The past is never where you think you left it.” 

― Katherine Anne Porter

Learning history in school, for the most of us was a dreaded task. All it felt like was memorizing dates and names of people that we think made no significant impact to our lives. What history pretty much boils downs to in schools is, a point of view through which the teacher wants us to see our past. The way its presented to us makes it interesting or something completely worthless to learn about. In general though, however much all of us might want to deny the fact that knowing our past is useful, it can be determined that without knowing where we began , our end is uncertain & undetermined.
Our past battles define us, the scars and the bruises are a reminder of what we actually fought for and what was important for us to fight for. History doesn't only teach us about our fights but studying the characters of history teaches us about human behavioural patterns, our communicative methods, our thresholds for knowledge and webs of interactions and empathy for others. There is so much to learn from the people who have left us with a treasure of knowledge.  Knowledge isn't considered important when it teaches you how to do things, but also the mistakes that were made by our predecessor also teaches us how not to do things. History saves our future some trouble of re-discovering everything. That is why a person who learns from their mistakes is called smart, a person who repeats his own mistake a fool, BUT a person who learns from other's mistake WISE. As humans who have the organ called brain, must use it, take advantage of what our past and other's past have taught us and imply it.
By doing this, it does not mean that you stop using your own brain. it definitely does not mean that what did not work in the past will never work. It will boil down to looking at the probability of the effectiveness of the method and decipher your step. Use it as a guide, a navigational system, which can lead you to a path that is better, but does not stop you from discovering your own.
For example.
Gandhi taught us patience for our battles, but also taught us not to make emotional decisions.

This was rather a tedious post, scattered thoughts it may seem, but at the end of the day this post will become my past and I shall learn from it :P:P

" Our past battles scar us, and sometimes they may seem worthless, but there will come a point in life when you will look back and see that you walked on a morbid path yet you came out alive" Skeptical self

Hope you like it !!


Skeptical Self  :)