its in the schedule

There are so many demands on daily life, it is important for a schedule to be in place. otherwise I guess its just impossible the demands of conflicting priorities. Once in place also the schedule makes for certain rigidity that my anti establishment tendencies find pretty irritating. Right now I am at 35 managing to find a balance between the two. But my daughter at 8 is another thing altogether.
She wants to do a lot and she clearly enjoys it tremendously. But it drives jasmine up the wall. Till now the pressure of school work was minimum but slowly as the pressure cranks up the walls seem to be bulging.
Jispa has her reviews happening. A lot of school work faces two kind of responses. Jasmine who wants it to be given due importance and me… who couldn’t really care less. I prefer sweating over the creative and fun stuff. The elocution competition, the sports day, the taekwondo kicks, creative writing etc. but math and Hindi are still there in the curriculum when I last checked and we still count those marks for promotion. So I guess that’s a given. So every time Jasmine will be stressing out on the math and Hindi and I will be like – let it be, let it be. And when it comes to the other stuff, I am in complete command with Jasmine only overseeing.
I also realise that jasmine is right. So it makes for an interesting balance. Otherwise both of us would have gone completely bonkers and taken Jispa along with.
So right now in the middle of all her activity we are struggling to find time for practice for her. How so we squeeze in time for her school practice as the reviews have started and how do we find time for her guitar practice, without which it’s pretty much impossible to learn the instrument.
I was trying to understand the schedule. I have learnt that it only works if it is a part of the schedule that is followed everyday. Jispa is also a dreamer. Someone who thinks of interesting things all the time. The imagination will always be in hyper mode. I get my best ideas in the shower or when I eating or doing something of a routine. It’s not a get over with it attitude but the brain starts functioning overtime and its gets lost in its thoughts. Jispa does that and bang…. There goes the schedule. The morning is a special pain. So I did the next bets thing. Disciplining my self to wake up on time. If I don’t wake up on time, I can’t wake her on time and then we are constantly rushing.
If the waking time is crunched and the shower hits the face fast enough rest of eth morning is much better. Jispa will get at least 30 minutes to practice everyday and I can use that time to also read. The key is to get all ready by 7 am. It happened today but I am not overtly bullish on it happening everyday. She got her practice time for a good 30 minutes. Here is a pic of her practising the guitar today morning.


Today while reading in the morning I came across what John Wheeler said – “Everything important, at the bottom, is essentially simple.” This was not a philosophy book but a physics book and this was in the chapter that was talking about quantum physics. But I couldn’t agree more. Most of the smartest people I met have said the same thing. If it is too complex it cannot be right. My best marketing teachers have always said that. Last week I saw a play on the life of mathematician Ramanujan. They also said something to the effect that – a mathematical equation has to be beautiful. Beauty lies in simplicity not complexity.
Most of all that we see or face – the answers lie in simple steps or terms. Can we have that one lens (Thank you Dharen for this example) through we which we can see everything and make sense of the complex games at play. Can we understand it so well that we can explain it to our mother (thank you prof Navalkar for this example). But essentially we only know it well if we can explain it well enough that a child could possible understand it.
I love it when Jispa asks me questions. It gives me great pleasure in explaining stuff to her. Yesterday she was talking about how stickers stick but don’t stick on the paper it comes in. interesting question. In trying to help her understand it I think I too cleared my mind on it. She then gets encouraged to ask more and more. What fun. I love this bit of parenting as well.
This too is only possible if I fit the schedule. Most of our father daughter interaction happens in the morning when I get to drop her to the bus stop. It get as high as the history of Indo Pak relations to something that is as sublime as sailing paper boats on the roadside streams near the bust stop. The latter is of particular interest to us and we hope for a decent stream everyday.