Sitting on the balcony overlooking the variety of palm trees and listening to the birds who inhabit them, I think of the comfortable place these sounds and smells place me. There is the sound of the broom sweeping across the pavement on the grounds below. These sounds and smells take me back to my childhood growing up in Pakistan during very formative years of my live, 12 to 15 years old. I think too it is significant that when my family resided in Pakistan, we stayed there for the entire three years without returning to the U.S. This extended time with no breaks must have influenced who I am today.
Sitting on this balcony in Bangkok takes me back to my childhood in Pakistan. My childhood in Pakistan is why I was drawn to living in Bangkok in the early eighties. It was the connections from Pakistan that fulfilled my desire to get a teaching job at the international school, parents of my friend who I used to sit on the rooftops with in Lahore, sharing our future dreams, our ideals and ideas. When I was searching overseas sites for a teaching job, my childhood friend's parents were living in Bangkok at the time and convinced the international school I would be an asset to them as a Kindergarten teacher.
I am convinced that those years in Pakistan were the happiest years of my childhood. It must have been where I felt safety, pleasure, and comfort. Just as we refer to eating certain food as "comfort food." These tastes connect us to fond memories, usually going back to our childhood.
Are not these "comfort moments" in our present life scaffolded upon happy moments from our childhood? And are these "nothing without joy" moments based on our feelings of love and acceptance from others in our lives, our family and friends? It affirms why my career has been based on an education philosophy holding front and center, the value of love shown by our reciprocity with others. In these formative childhood years in Pakistan, there was more time to truly and deeply communicate with each other. In those days back in the sixties, there was not much technology obtrusion in the states, and definitely none in Pakistan, not even television. So our entertainment was with each other between family and friends. It must have been the place where my family was happiest.
In my first time returning to Bangkok last year after twenty eight years, I wrote that I felt this energy of familiarity and comfort here as soon as I got outside the airport waiting for my taxi. I also felt that there was a presence with me even though I was alone. Maybe this was my mother who passed on to her eternal life over a decade ago. I know she is with me in spirit and I feel her more in these moments sitting on this balcony overlooking the familiarity of Asia that arouses all my senses and feelings of peace. Was Pakistan the happiest time for you, Mom? I will ask my Dad but I think my mom is saying
"Yes."
Sitting on this balcony with the long distance view of Bangkok brings back these "nothing without joy" moments of sitting on the rooftops in Pakistan. It must be why I prefer a home with a long distance view like in California, where I can see the waves of the ocean a half mile away from our fourth floor apartment on the side of the hill.
My trips to Bangkok are a place I can be without obtrusions, bombarded by the every day decisions of life. I make this vow to my self to take this feeling where ever I go. Speaking to a friend in California today, she expressed her crazy busy life, and when I gave her my expression of the value of slowing down and breathing, she responded, yes, I know these things but I forget. I don't want to forget.
Sitting with this long distance view of the tropics here in Bangkok or of the waves in Ventura, I will pause and "not forget" to "slow down" and enjoy this present moment.
It is this same place where we can truly "be" with children. They give us this time and reminder to "slow down" and enjoy the moment, they do it so well and being in their presence reminds of this so we don't "forget" to do it in our own lives.
Now I will go to a place where I will be bombarded by obtrusion but joy filled ones, the eb and flow of life. It is like the waves that come and go. I think I will go explore Bangkok's China Town, and see what treasures I can find to create my art, it is this place of creating that puts us into our soul and heart.
And when we are in our "inner soul" a word another dear friend expressed to me in our recent reciprocity of conversation, we are our happiest. It is where I am now, where I am when I create and where my mother must have been living in Pakistan.
