What we can learn from our grandparents

How does it feel to slowly lose control of your body and health over time? Why do grandparents hide the intensity of their physical pain and delay going to the doctor for as long as they can? Why do dadis everywhere begin their morning with a fight with the maasi (house help)? Why do all our nanis constantly try to feed us when we go to spend time with them? A string of deaths and debilitating sickness of grandparents in my circle of friends and family made me realise the value of a blessing we take for granted: grandparents and their accumulated wisdom on life. This made me talk to my grandparents in ways I hadn’t before.

I began by asking my grandparents what the biggest source of happiness was in their life. They said their children and their grandchildren. While this is the answer we would expect from them, the way their eyes light up when they talk about their children shows that there’s more substance to this statement than meets the eye initially. Family isn’t just the biggest source of happiness for them but they actually lived out a life in which family was always the number one priority. This is different from most us Generation X, millennial types, who, while paying lip service to new-age mantras like ‘family first’, struggle to actually make real sacrifices that put family before all else. There’s no doubt that family will also be our biggest source of happiness when we become grandparents. But will we feel we’ve done justice to our families in our busy, to the point of ridiculous, modern-day lives? Will we run the race of our lives and realise at the end that we ran the wrong race?

The biggest insight from these conversations was how we — with our health and able bodies — are unable to make the most of our lives before we age ourselves. When you talk to grandparents, they tell you that they lived really fulfilling lives but time passed much faster than they had imagined. And yet, we, in the prime of our lives, hold ourselves prisoners to our circumstances. We try not to put our money where our mouth is when it comes to following our passions and purpose because we worry that straying from the ‘safe’ path might land us in trouble. We forget that even if we play it safe all our lives, we will still lose our health and become dependent on others. We will live the second half of our lives as prisoners inside our bodies. Why do we live the first half of our lives as prisoners of our limited imagination?

Our grandparents went through a lot. But life and time has a way to put on a rosier lens through which we’ll view our past. For example, my nana and dadi happen to be siblings (long story). Before Partition, their dad had bought land to build houses for all his children, next to one another in their village in India. They gave up that land when moving to Pakistan and built their lives from scratch in a new country. Somehow, my grandparents only have good memories from their childhood even though they lived through one of the most traumatic partitions in the history of mankind. For example, instead of remembering the tough times, my dadi still tells me about the first time the men of the house brought shampoo home. The women of the house didn’t know what they were supposed to do with the shampoo, so they started washing the floors with it.

My dadi, who married around the age of 14 and had her first son around the age of 17, still fondly remembers how her father would spoil her and how her mother’s facial features were so beautiful. Even though my dada passed away when her children were very young, my dadi says she’s lived a good life and still has so much zest for it. If our grandparents can still have so much spirit and tenacity, why do we extinguish the fire in our belly at life’s first disappointment? What do they know about life that we don’t? Perhaps, they’ve understood that most things in life — like ageing — are outside our control. The only thing we can control is our attitude. And that makes all the difference.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 14^th, 2016.

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