Why are we so stingy with receiving kindness when we are too happy to give it to others?

Journal entry from 2016. When asked for feedback, my cohort from the altMBA program said the following:

“You are warm, energetic, intelligent, observant, joyful, very likable and driven. You are also compassionate and kind.

Possibly also generous but I don’t know you well enough to determine.

You are highly capable, in fact, much more than you choose to do. I think you are very careful about the commitments you choose for yourself be it work, people or activities.

You like control and reliability is important to you. So you commit to things you know you can deliver on.

You do go for stretch but you limit the extent of stretch so that you can learn and achieve, but not fail.

You hold back your thoughts, contributions, reactions, emotions.

You share just enough to fit with the group you are in. You hold back your intelligence so that people don’t pay attention to it and aren’t threatened by it.

You practice patience but I don’t think you are that patient internally. Bottom line, I think you are much more powerful and capable than you choose to show and pursue.”

I am grateful for her insightful and kind feedback. I agree.

Instead of waiting idly, I throw things away. I declutter. I scavenge artifacts of inked pasts to reveal parts demanding to be filed away.

The helpless child has been freed. But she leaves behind her old habits.

Her crying, biting, and running away. Never secure and always afraid. Every man is a threat. She is powerless. She is mute.

Not wanting to be abandoned, she is stubborn yet agreeable at all the wrong times. She is adventurous yet timid because she knows a secret. She develops a scowl as if she were a beast to keep predators at bay. To be undesirable. To not be approachable. To be left alone. She hides herself. She hides her beauty to stay in tact. To be kept safe. She imagine a bubble to keep everything out. This also means nothing can enter.

She makes connections where there is none. She attributes her scowl or her beastly ability for escaping the thorny nightmare. She thinks what she had engineered as a child is what kept her alive.

Simple truth remained unseen. Bad things happen with no reason. The end had nothing to do with the child’s efforts or her fighting spirit.

The child remains.

I thought I had set her free. But she lingers and I must get rid of all her hiding places. So that she can be free to go into the light. She is still used to the darkness.

Tears fall as I file and shred.

I wish I could tear these memories into strips of paper, pack them into trash bags and leave them out on the curb to be picked up and thrown away. Leave me and my house. I wish it were easy.

So that I can be free of this burdensome shadow. So that I can be free to let the air in. So that I can finally disembark from this bubble of protection.

But I know better. Gibran writes, “work is love made visible”

The only way is through what the Lion calls furnace of truth. I must throw into his mouth her old habits and childish connections. I must feed fire with more truth until the furnace roars and breathes out ashes to extinguish the darkness feeding on omission and avoidance. To let the fire create light so I can see what I had been hiding for too long. To illuminate the monsters lurking in the darkness, waiting to be seen and acknowledged.

This is another journey I hadn’t planned on embarking on. The fire makes my eyes water and tears stream down once again.

I don’t want to be here, yet this is exactly where I am supposed to be.

Don’t waste it.

Don’t save it.

Don’t dread or delay it.

Use it and use it well.

Be on time. Show up.

Time powers life’s roller coaster of ups and downs of love and birth. Of loss and death. Of good and bad. Of pleasant and dreadful. Scarce and abundant.

Opposites attract to balance each other.

On “12 Rules for Life”, Jordan Peterson quotes or writes: the line between good and evil bisects everyone down the middle. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. We aren’t just good. Evil is in our DNA.

I’ve been listening (on repeat) to Rule 8: Tell the truth – or at least, don’t lie.
Because it tugged at my insides. It helped me to confront my habitual sin of omission for the fear of conflict. Not saying to not offend. Not knowing how. Never been taught.

This is also a learned behavior of two generations. Therefore, it is difficult (if not impossible) to unlearn terrible habits. This may be due to inadequate parental guidance due to economic hardship, incompetence, and absent parent.

At the same time, my optimism and stubborn nature won’t let me settle for anything less than a triumphant defeat of my previous self.

I know very little. I could be wrong about many things. The frame is misshapen or broken. I may have misunderstood. And I am blessed to have special people in my life to push, prod, guide and lead by example. Superb people surround me all over the world.

I am trying to get better at speaking up. To be brave. To have difficult conversations. To ask for things. To break the cycle. To break free from the collective tyranny of my former self.

Because if we can’t reveal ourselves to others, we will be unable to see ourselves for what we are.

Life is a journey of self discovery. Time is the road. Our thoughts, efforts and actions determine our path and destination.

I used to pray to stop the suffering of the soon to be departed. Once she left us, I prayed for her peace. Then for her to protect us. Then it turned into a longing and wishful thinking. I missed her and I reached out in the only way I knew how.

I no longer pray. I still believe in the power of positive thinking. I believe in the power of acknowledging fear, facing the monster inside of me, and taking small steps to do better.

I see a parallel between bible and best of the fables.
God and Jesus.
If we are on a road to self-discovery, and we must shed our old shells before moving forward. We must destroy our former selves to reveal the next level of truth waiting to be discovered. We must forge ourselves through self-immolation of our former and younger selves. No pain, no gain they say.

Maybe God is me. God is you. God is every single one of us. The future. The end.
And Jesus is me. Jesus is you. Jesus is the past. Fallible human of the today.

When we celebrate Jesus’s demise, we acknowledge the necessary sacrifices of the past before being born anew. Transformation is as painful as being nailed to the cross of our former selves blistered with terrible habits. Maybe we must be forced to carry the burden of the past before we get the courage to offload the baggage weighing us down.

We continue the burning process until we arrive at the end of our times, when we become the best (or for some, the worst) version of our greatest (or sadly, wasted) potential.

When we pray to God, we dig into our deepest and sincerest desires. Prayers are daily reminders to do what is necessary. I wonder if we become God on our last day on earth. Yesterday and Today is all that is left. Tomorrow will never come, and with this knowledge, I wonder what thoughts flash before we take our final breath (that is, if we are lucky to be awake and lucid). Like all mysterious things, we don’t know because the ones who know are gone. And by the time we do know, documenting is probably the furthest thing from our minds.

And the wind will blow.

Ash scatters to reveal a set of bright, strong and magnificent wings of a bird.

It jumps from the ledge. Plunging into the abyss of total freedom, it spreads its wings to let truth carry its body into the embrace of self acceptance.

The Phoenix rises.

We each found a crack and wedged ourselves in. We prayed for rain. Welcome showers washed away dirt from our faces. Uninvited downpours threatened to wash us away. Heavenly sun kept us company. But it would stay too long and burn our bodies until the veil of night. We grew afraid of what cannot be seen.

Still, we held our heads up high.
Still, we planted our feet firmly into the ground.

And like weeds, we survived.
And like weeds, we thrived.
And like weeds, we are alive.

The blunt end of a small blade rests between my thumb and index finger. Pushing the sharp edge against the tip of a pencil, I peel off layers of wood and graphite. I spin the pencil as I glide the sharp knife against the graphite’s edge, slowly but with precision until the end feels sharp against my index finger. After few minutes, I tuck the knife back in my pocket. The pencils go inside my metal case. I rest against the concrete wall to rest.

In front of me is a drinking well. Cylindrical in shape, the well is four feet tall. The top covered with two semi-circles of concrete, it provides drinking water through a series of underground piping. It is located behind my Harabeji’s house and my old neighbor’s house. To the left of Harabeji’s house, an alleyway snakes out into the main road. To the left of the alley is another house. This is where the twins live. And between the twins and another house is yet another alley. This another house is just next to my old neighbor’s house. The two alleys connect two “main” roads, surrounded by five houses.

I stand next to the wall in front of the well to shade myself against the heat. A memory comes to me. I’m not sure if it really happened, an imagination sprouting from a story I once read, or simply a dream.

This is what happened, or what I remember from that bright summer day. A gaggle of people fills the two small alleys. As if playing a game of tug of war, each stand an arm’s length behind one other. The air is eerily quiet and no one is taking the lead. In unison, they pull a short and thick rope. Sweat beads down their sun-kissed faces, and they continue pulling.

I’m too small to help, and so I do what I do best. I stand back and observe. There is no one to indulge my curiosity but it appears a man has fallen inside. I’ve never seen adults hang around here. Why would anyone be so stupid to fall INSIDE the well? The tug-of-war goes on for some time. How long can a man stay afloat with no space to tread water? How much time do we have before gulping for our last breath? How long can he hold on to the end of a rope? I’m too short to peer inside, and I know it’d be inappropriate to do so, even if I were a beanstalk.

My memory stops there. Did the man survive? Or was it a woman? Was it a dream?

I jolt myself back to the present. I spend a lot of my time here. Lost in my own thoughts, sharpening pencils. Creating worlds of my own imagination.

I start writing on a notebook, held together by a spiral metal spine. After a while, I interrogate the pencils once again. Testing the sharpness of the lead with my index finger, I take out the trusty knife to make the tips pointy again.

I am covered in black, head to toe. Too hot for this heat. Or, maybe not. The weather turns. Scattered rain quenches the heat and my arms grow cold.

A cappuccino arrives in grey porcelain cup with a floating heart atop the dark liquid.

“The origin of religion and the fact that we are Indian…” the man in front has an audience: his family. I don’t have headphones to drown him out.

My eyes move onto the screen as I change the pronoun from she to I.

Because this is my story. As I peer into my past, what I once thought trivial is turning rather interesting. Even academic. An internal chuckle. Rice paddies. Drizzles. Tadpoles and dragonflies.

I clean up a chapter from moving onto the next.

I remember the texture of what remains of rice stalks under my feet, in the midst of autumn festival. Hard and strong, it is the same bristle we use to sweep rough surfaces to clean away the grime.

As daylights get shorter, winter will arrive. Without a doubt, it will bring snow and cold rain to freeze the water underneath, to create another playground to keep us busy. Until the ice breaks, becomes messy slush, before it is set free to give life another chance to thrive with the dawning of spring!!!

I stop by a colleague’s desk for no specific reason. What do you know?She also loves to write. A coffee date is promptly scheduled for Thursday. Maybe we could push and pull each other to unleash our words into this world. Then I read the last 5 pieces on this very site.

Words I desperately needed to soothe the fear inside. Reminders to be grateful. To not worry about the things outside of my control. To wait it out without the great freak out.

Streams of worry and fear flow through fossils of previous thoughts crafted when I was in a much better state of sanity.

We lament. But we don’t put in the hours. We don’t do the work.

I offer CV advice for free to a selected few. The CV usually starts with “Private and Confidential curriculum vitae of so and so”. Page 1 wasted.

After initial feedback and coaching, the CV doesn’t drastically improve. It’s full of job descriptions and free marketing of the company he/she works for. It lacks the personal spice. What did you do to make things better? How did you make a difference? What sets you apart?

It takes me an average 23 seconds to reject a resume/CV. It takes 90 seconds to toss it into maybe pile. 2 minutes for a firm yes.

Usually, when the first page simply states the name, the rest of content is hardly a page turner. It’s inconsiderate of the reader as I need to figure out how this person fit into the overall organization and how she added value.

How do you make it better? My guidelines are as follows.

1. Ask yourself. Do you want to read it?
2. Then ask. What do you think of your CV, if you were the hiring manager?
3. Contact details should be clear and concise. Include your name, email, phone, and the city of residence. You don’t have to include the following labels: email, phone, and address. If someone can’t tell that your email address is someone@somewhere.com , you don’t want to work for that person/company
4. Number the pages on the bottom.
5. Formatting and readability matters. If you have multiple sections, all sections/headers should all look the same. Avoid multiple formatting/colors and font sizes.
6. Be concise and specific. Avoid jargon.
7. Instead of stating your job description, tell us what you achieved: Situation, Action, Result.
8. If you don’t tell us, we won’t know what you did. We never will because you won’t be invited to interview.

In closing, do the work. It takes at least 6 revisions to make it better. Revise it. Sleep on it. Look at it again. Share with others for honest feedback.

Do the work! Do the work!