Tag: Me

Posted on

Dishes, Dry Yourselves

I’m not quite sure what psychological phenomenon happened to me when I was young, but I hate drying dishes.

When I was younger and would have to wash the dishes at home, I think I hardly ever dried the dishes at all. In fact, I think I could probably count on my fingers the amount of times I dried the dishes. And I think I could even carry that over to putting the dishes away. How did that happen?

When I recollect my various times of doing the dishes, I remember someone would always clear the dish rack for me while I ran the water. It was not because I was unable to, but I always remember wither my mum or my dad telling me that they would clear the dish rack for me while I started. I can hardly remember a time when I actually had to put the dishes away.

Another factor that played into my strange dish-washing psychology is the fact that we have a huge dish-rack at our house. Large, and with three levels, one hardly had reason to run out of space for dishes and, if planned well, one could cram a piles of dishes into the space that was there. Besides, on rack, the dishes simply dried themselves, by no effort my own.

And so, somehow, from these various elements that made up my dish washing history, I spawned an aversion to drying dishes. I really don’t mind to wash them – in fact I find it a relaxing, almost therapeutic exercise – just don’t ask me to dry them.

Posted on

The Choices That Make Us

I yearn for pieces of my past – perhaps because they are pieces of me. Something as simple as eating my rice with my hands while sitting cross-legged on the couch – I love it.

These things never had this much importance to me. I certainly didn’t eat with my hands every day in Pakistan. But there’s something about it – something nostalgic that transcends experience. I find that I feel a greater desire to live stereotypes – to fulfill every expectation of the displaced immigrant, pining for home. I become that person. I choose to become him.

Everyone has their aspirations. Everyone wishes they were different in some way, whether for better or for worse. And there comes a time, or we can make it come, when we are faced with a choice to live that person. In many ways it really just comes down to that, a choice. Some people make it. They dress as if from another world, or act like they are from another time. They live and breathe a persona that they themselves invented, and eventually chose to live. They become that persona, that character.

I’ve never quite understood those people. The people who cut a path apart from everyone else. But I see the method in it. I too make choices that comprise who I am – we all do. Sometimes I even shape my surroundings with the hope that somehow they will bring me to be the person I want to be. That perhaps surrounding myself with books will make me read them, and that putting notebooks on my shelves, I will be forced to write in them.

Ultimately everyone makes choices of who they are. In many ways we are shaped by the world around us, but in many ways we are really shaped by the choices we make – the things we let in, and the things we leave out. I don’t have the flame-red hair, the 20s wardrobe, or piercings all over my face, but perhaps that just makes me who I am as well. I am a simple guy. I like books, and sometimes I read them. I keep a lot of notebooks, and sometimes I write in them. I like chai, rice and I eat pie for birthdays. I like international relations, cultures and colours. I serve a great God and I don’t belong in this world. I live because of something I had no control over, an act of incomprehensible grace – but I made a choice, and I live each day in the grace of that choice.

Posted on

Free Spirit

When we arrived at our place in St. Thomas, Ontario, where my family and I would stay for a part of the summer, one of the first things we did was pull out our bikes. My dad went over to our old house where my uncle and aunt are living, to bring over the few bikes we had stored there as well as two that we were borrowing from my uncle and aunt.

When the bikes arrived in the back of the truck, my brother and I were asked to go and help my dad clean them all up and get them ready for riding. We hadn’t seen most of the bikes at all, and when we did, were we ever surprised. The two bikes from my uncle and aunt were shiny and new, mountain bikes in their prime. They had enough gears to keep you changing all day and looked too good to even ride. My dad’s bike on the other hand, had seen a much different life. Dragged out of someone’s garbage, it was rusty, cheap and far past its prime, if it ever had one! Then there was my bike, or my sister’s; we weren’t quite sure. It looked like a kid’s bike, painted burgundy, used here and there and nothing special in any way. However, the bike that caught my attention was not any of these. Instead, it was my mum’s old ten-speed racing bike from high school. It’s thin frame and tires looked used and enjoyed while its old chrome joints wore the rust of time. ‘Free Spirit’ was painted on the frame in thin white letters.

Looking at the bike and reading those words, it struck me that this bike was a relic of the past. Other bikes had ‘Mountain Tamer,’ ‘Ridge Rider,’ and ‘Trailblazer’ written across them, but it seemed to me, a completely different approach. These new mountain bikes were well oiled machines, made to conquer nature, climb the highest mountain and tear down into valley. But in my mum’s blue racing bike was something else: a free spirit. It echoed a breath of fresh air from the past. It was the kind of bike that seemed to camouflage into whichever weathered fence it leaned against. It seemed at home wherever it was. It didn’t shout out its existence, but faded into a quite place of being without screaming. Its rusted frame asked only to be free, to fly across paths, not bending nature to itself, but simply enjoying it. It held a spirit, not of conquering but of enjoying.

I saw in that bike a desire that I had longed to fulfil. One of being. Not being loud, not being noticed but just being. To me, that bike was freedom; freedom to roam wherever I pleased and to enjoy nature as a part of it. It was there, riding on my mum’s old bike from high school; a bike that had been around long before I was born, that I felt truly free; a ‘Free Spirit.’