Heads Up

Right now, I am preparing for a long trip with my family again. Time flies so fast! I had just traveled with them in December but I realise it has been eight months since that. We are exploring new terrain, at least three of us are, venturing North and closer to the Himalayas. After living over two years in a country where winter wear is a joke, hopefully my skin and hair can survive. Of course, I am super excited to spend time with my family, and take a breather after what has been a few intense months of work. What’s more, I tried way too hard to plan my time outside work so perfectly that it ended up being too good to be true. No, you can’t be exercising, meal-prepping, barely eating (cause your cooking skills have deteriorated), using your brain at full-power by working overtime and then not crash-out.  This break is coming at the perfect juncture. 

Not to bring back pilates in back-to-back blog posts, but I had two different instructors use me as the example to demonstrate how your posture needs to look like when doing a certain exercise, within the same week.  A very long way indeed for someone who struggles with posture. I used to find a lot of comfort in slouching, and drooping my shoulders, especially when I wasn’t feeling my best emotionally. While those Eeyore days still do come and go, I think with age and with a lot of conscious effort, I recognise the value of standing tall, shoulders straight, head held up high. Sometimes, there is a qualified instructor to hype you up but most times it’s just you. I love that video of Indra Nooyi that comes up on my feed, life gets challenging and people expect you to crumble. You just gotta take a 15-minute cry, redo the make-up and keep going. 

In other news, my  sister has begun her working life in an almost South-Mumbai-based-Netflix-drama fashion, only in Kochi. I was reminded of my first exposure to corporate life - learning that work and college dynamics are very very different, one embarrassing interaction after another. I used to work at a company that marketed “flexible timings” during the placement process. As a naturally lazy person who struggles with mornings, especially after long work shifts, you can imagine exactly how that went. There I was, just 20-years old, in my kurti and jhumkas, humming to the song playing in my wired headphones (yeah, that long ago), walking into a work bay where everyone in my team including my boss’s boss had been working for over two hours. When called aside, I said “but .. flexible timings?”. No points for guessing that did NOT go down well. Unlike my sister, I didn’t have the advantage of .. well, me! An elder sister who has seen it all, done it all, and knows where the mousetraps are quite well by now. I advise on being diplomatic and first impressions, and of course, the importance of email timestamps. I hope she survives, I know the graceful dancer in her will figure it out. 

In the last couple of weeks, I learnt (again) how blessed I am to have quite a few good friends who always lend a kind shoulder, offer words of advice and are a phone call away, across timezones. Even if I am speaking to them after years, the bond has remained (pleasantly surprising) intact. Despite being in different places in our life’s path, the relatability and the inside jokes stay top notch. I had friends visit me after years too, and rave in person about this very blog (hehehe). My identity and mannerisms have become so ubiquitous that these visiting friends put down “cycling at ECP” as the activity to be done with me. Again, blessed. I think it’s time I share why ECP is so important to me. When I first arrived in the country for my internship, I was taking a big leap of faith in myself. I had to really put my best foot forward on a daily basis. My sweetest memory from those two months was when my cousin, my niece and I went cycling at ECP for the first time, as suggested by a work buddy. We spent a sunny morning racing on our bicycles, grabbing condensed milk toast at a restaurant we saw (which has now become my go-to) and sat on a bench to watch the soft waves on the beach. All three of us were going through some rough patches, and that morning stood out as a core memory of laughter, hope and resilience. We have all come quite far since then; although I must admit I still occasionally walk in to work in my jhumkas, humming to a song only to realise I should have checked in way sooner.