Daily musings #617- Friday, 4 November 2022

My trips to India and elsewhere opens my mind to extensive thinking each time. This time I got to meet several of my family members and friends.

I got together with five of my friends from my University days in my hometown of Coimbatore and a couple from that same circle in Chennai on my way out from India. Thanks to the effort of a few of my passionate colleagues put in, we have a WhatsApp group with 37 out of 50 former classmates. An interesting bunch and disparate group of people as it can get.

One of the things I do is to compare notes on health, challenges, unique things, and family (both upstream and downstream - as we are all in our 50s) and I found a common thread. Life is perfectly imperfect.

There were a variety of challenges supporting the elders, health issues of various kinds, and downstream challenges with children - when one stands back and looked at things from a distance - life seemed fairly distributed. The patterns were painfully similar in a variety of ways. In all these, there were loads of successes to celebrate - of the individuals, their children, and their parents and families. Also, to note there were gems of hidden artistic skills in my classmate network. Things that I would have never known or expected them to be. There was amazing talent in there to appreciate.

Wealth did not separate us. Some were financially wealthier than others. And some were superiorly happier with simpler lives. And what again is wealth? Is it just money? Was it the investment streams that sustained oneself? Was it what your family passed down to you? Was it how healthy one was, with the least amount of problems? Is it the state of the circle of upstream or downstream family members around you? The social networks? The scale of the company you worked for? One’s popularity? The citizenship papers for the countries one has? One keeps pondering on how to make such meaning. Or does this even matter at all?

One final pattern I noticed. Not one, not even one of us attributed our University education (or our high schooling) to our eventual success in life. Perhaps most of it was only foundational in some way to get us started. Many did not use them at all. And built fundamentally new learnings, skills, entrepreneurship, and other competencies and tried things that led them to survival and success.

Life is perfectly imperfect. Life is a great teacher. We live and learn. And learn to live. And adapt. And survive. And thrive. We were and are all just human. Nothing more.