Ni and Gan -Ma Thuy's 2 "little" belovedLearning to love
One of my friends told me that the older she got, the less patient she became. And she is not the only one who feels so. The world seems to be so crowded, we can hardly walk the earth without having to shoulder or elbow left and right to inch ahead. At the end of the day, I would consider myself lucky to get home in one piece. There were times when I almost risked my life stopping at a red light while there was no traffic from the other direction. Having escaped from crashing with me from behind, people would shout at me as they passed : are you nuts or what?
Recently Ni sent me descriptions for the five of us: Granny, Dad, Mom, Ni and Gan. What’s interesting was we were all trees in those definitions. Ni said, just for fun, con nho me lam. But going through these adjectives I do see us in there. Isn’t it amazing? Are there really that many adjectives? Yet you can hardly find any that appear in two individual “variables”. Whoever invented those adjectives must have been puzzled over differentiated behaviors of human beings, so much that they took care to give each category a whole word system.
Imagine us as a forest: a walnut, a cedar, a pine, an oak, or even a plant… And that those trees do not exactly stand still beside one another, but each has a message to send out. Hey, you out there! If you don’t mind, my system works its own way, but if the way in which I think and live is different than yours. It is not necessarily that either one of us is inferior or superior to the other. Trouble is, such messages are not always well received, if at all. As a result, a walnut tree would go on looking down on a mushroom, or a lilac plant would die because of the expanding roots of an oak. But to look at life as a forest is to put it mildly. In the real world, the challenges are not that simple. The love-hatred affair is a long-lasting tragedy, because while each of us is so full of ourselves, we are expected to live together, some of us even “till death do us part”. In addition, as Christians, we are assigned to an impossible task: love others as much as the love you have for yourself, enemy and beloved alike.
One of my friends told me that the older she got, the less patient she became. And she is not the only one who feels so. The world seems to be so crowded, we can hardly walk the earth without having to shoulder or elbow left and right to inch ahead. At the end of the day, I would consider myself lucky to get home in one piece. There were times when I almost risked my life stopping at a red light while there was no traffic from the other direction. Having escaped from crashing with me from behind, people would shout at me as they passed : are you nuts or what?
Recently Ni sent me descriptions for the five of us: Granny, Dad, Mom, Ni and Gan. What’s interesting was we were all trees in those definitions. Ni said, just for fun, con nho me lam. But going through these adjectives I do see us in there. Isn’t it amazing? Are there really that many adjectives? Yet you can hardly find any that appear in two individual “variables”. Whoever invented those adjectives must have been puzzled over differentiated behaviors of human beings, so much that they took care to give each category a whole word system.
Imagine us as a forest: a walnut, a cedar, a pine, an oak, or even a plant… And that those trees do not exactly stand still beside one another, but each has a message to send out. Hey, you out there! If you don’t mind, my system works its own way, but if the way in which I think and live is different than yours. It is not necessarily that either one of us is inferior or superior to the other. Trouble is, such messages are not always well received, if at all. As a result, a walnut tree would go on looking down on a mushroom, or a lilac plant would die because of the expanding roots of an oak. But to look at life as a forest is to put it mildly. In the real world, the challenges are not that simple. The love-hatred affair is a long-lasting tragedy, because while each of us is so full of ourselves, we are expected to live together, some of us even “till death do us part”. In addition, as Christians, we are assigned to an impossible task: love others as much as the love you have for yourself, enemy and beloved alike.
Loving our beloved is not actually easy, especially in this badly disturbed world. Many times a day in the office I would feel an urge to go home and check on Gan, or to pick up the phone and talk to Ni. Before they made their appearance in my life, it had felt so simple, the whole business of loving. I had thought love was just a “take it or leave it” affair. If you don’t feel it right enough, you are free to walk away. Nothing can be further from the truth than that notion. You are stuck for life when you fall in love with your kids; together with the love for them would come a life-long sense of insecurity that awakes you at night, not having a say over what is going to happen in their lives. You would never feel safe enough to let them go: it’s always too soon to do that to your kids. Reading their descriptions overwhelmed me with love, for I could imagine those little creatures with what they have to contribute to life, love to give, grief to share, trouble to overcome… I long to hold my daughter in a tight cuddle, to feel the freshness of her cheeks against mine. I want to rumple the shock of Gan’s hair, to keep his head in my bosom so that I can protect him from any potential ill-will out there.It does not mean, however, that you don’t fight the ones you love. Because of our differences, it is just a matter of hours, days, or if we are real lucky, weeks, before we find ourselves in a clash with our loved. Mostly we would make out of it in one piece, but there are times when it is fatal and we end up in shambles, not really registered how we could be so hurtful and ruthless to somebody we claimed to be the love of our life. And it may have started with just a slip of our tongue that grew into an insult and then before we knew it, a total denial of the bond between the two of us…. Many of us are still puzzled to this day as to how could it happen after all the effort and determination to nourish our love.
Well, that is about loving those you adore. What is then about loving your “enemy”? “Enemy” in brackets, because it is fortunate of me that I don’t really hate anybody. The hardest thing I can do to anybody is to stay away from them. I still remember a half-joke Ni, Gan and I made, when we wished that odors could emit colored vapors, so we would know better than step into proximity of somebody with pungent smell under their arms, or something to that effect. Then we thought about people with bad intentions. If only we could see that aura of bleak thoughts and stay away from those. But this is not our invention. It has occurred to many others before us to try finding a way, or a tool, to keep us from crossing our path with ill-willed people’s. A non-fighter’s attitude. Fat chance! It has been known that life is not that black and white, and the world is not divided into bad and good groups of people. Not unlike how a tree changes throughout the seasons of the year, us humans tend to be most unpredictable. It is known to have happened, that this minute a person is still one of our best friends, the next minute jealousy/envy would claim over such friendship and cause the best friend to hurt us beyond imagination. On the other hand, it is possible that the jobless guys in your alley who booze and smoke and gossip most of the day would be the ones who come to your rescue, when somebody from your family gets ill and needs emergency transport to hospital.
As for ourselves, we should not be so sure about what we think we are. Take myself (talk about being self-centered) as an example. All my life I make it a point to be fair and square in every deal possible. As it happened, because nobody ever complained about the deal, I did not know that there were times the kids did not want to hurt me so they went ahead to accept my remarks or to carry out their instructions. I used to get so irritated about how my daughter would take so much time to do something that others (me included) could fulfill in much less time. After an endless course of time, I decided to take it as one of her features. Then out of the blue she wrote me a note where she took me back through her child hood, when most of the time her Dad and I had to run from one job to another, leaving her pretty much in a lonely world, and she had to find enough things to fill up her days. With so much time on her hand, she ended up talking to a plump tree in front of a neighbor’s place, which happened to be a coffee shop so the shop owner had no choice than chase her away. Fortunately, shortly after that Gan came to our lives, so she had plenty to take care of, in a more lively and commonsensical way than keeping a plum’s tree company. However, this episode left indentation in the way in which we are so different from one another.
Again, I am aware that it is not my invention that we should learn to live with differences between us and others. My revelation is that, learning to love is a never done task, that whenever we feel exhausted from this effort, just go on and make some more effort. This exercise should not be neglected, especially the self-scrutiny to make sure you are what you think you are. You may find it worth your while, with eventual peace of mind.
Ngo Thuy, December 2005
