#social commitment

Today’s Book of the Day is Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius from 161 to 180. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher. He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the Five Good Emperors (the others were Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability for the…

The best choices we can make are those that at the same time will help us and those around us. As we live in a society, our individual well-being cannot be independent from the collective interest and growth.

The Armed Forces Covenant (2011)

Document Title

Armed Forces Covenant.

Abstract

The Military Covenant has existed as an unwritten social and moral commitment between the State and the Armed Forces that has developed through long standing convention and customs. Historically it has been largely associated with the Army, although its principles are applied across all three Services. Although it currently has no legal basis, it…

It was a nondescript Wednesday. Like what normal people do on a Wednesday, I was hunched over fiddling around on my phone and happened to notice our weekend schedule. We had a lunch and a dinner invitation on Saturday and then a lunch invitation on Sunday. To be perfectly honest, besides the fact that at the end of the weekend I was expecting to be more tired than I was on the Friday before, I was not exactly pleased that I wouldn't be able to watch the 1’o clock football (the American kind) games. Granted that it’s as First-World of a problem as it can be and, I know it’s silly that I am attached to a sport whose existence was unknown to me no more than a decade ago and, it’s even sillier that I was fretting over not being able to waste my time watching organized sports when I could be at what would be a delightful afternoon with people I had met and grown close to, and yet, for some reason, the busy schedule bothered me like it would bother a teenager if he is asked to spend time with the so-called grownups. The incident made me ponder. I was living in a different country, belonged to a whole different social circle only about 3 years ago and here I am today -- all worked up about having a social circle!

I immigrated to Canada about 3 years ago and to the US about 7 years before that, both times being fully aware that those will be literally new beginnings. They have been. Among many other things, I was apprehensive about building up a social circle -- in other words, finding friends like the ones I had left behind. I am certainly not alone in this experience for, most of whom I met in social gatherings and shared a conversation that fired my imagination or helped discover a common interest, went through the same process and we all ended up in a big entangled ball of thread that is our social circle today. It's definitely a better position than we could have hoped for. Sometimes even more so than that we are comfortable with.

It could have gone downhill pretty easily. If you think about it, the odds of you or I or anyone belonging to the social circles we belong to today is slim to none in an alternate universe. It's a miracle that our lives are tangled in the way they are; that our stories have unfolded together in the way they have. Numerous events had to fall in an exact order, all the parallel decisions had to be made in the exact sequence and, all the fortunate happenstances had to be incredibly fortuitous and only then something as improbable as you and I -- two people from two opposites corners of a sizeable country -- ending up in a country across the globe and belonging to the same social group could become reality. This very unlikeliness makes it boundlessly fascinating and if you say that the friends are our pillars of strength then it makes us extremely propitious to be able to count on that one person through thick and thin. Any one of those myriad of decisions in life if taken differently would have taken us in a completely different place and who knows what kind of adversities we would have had to deal with then.

So here is my question. What’s all the gripe about? Where is it coming from?

Complaints generally come from a position of comfort and I think this case is no different. Most of us are at a stage in life where things are more or less self-sustaining and that is quite a luxury which a lot of people don't have. Our jobs are fine, our lifestyle choices largely adhere to populist ideas and are well accepted in wide circles if society. As they say, we got it easy. However, not everyone is like us. Other than the socially awkward ones, there are people, kind and good people, whose life choices have led them into the dark corners of the society and in a lot of cases, in absence of a support system, they are left all alone to deal with the misery that came with it. I think just the fact that we are afforded a luxury of having a social circle who is kind enough to invite us on any occasion is something that must be valued highly and protected with all honor. It's, after all, a luxury.

I understand social commitment is sometimes a bit too much to ask of a person who is juggling a high-stress job, a family and all the additional stress that comes with an immigrant's life. At the end of that 80 hour week when one wants to kick back, have a glass of wine and watch football or do whatever one needs to do to de-stress, asking to attend to a social commitment may very well be the last straw. Wonderful people or the tired brain that is screaming for some downtime -- it's not only a hard side to pick but also an extremely difficult matter to balance. The solution however I think is simple -- an honest dialog with the person on the other side. That is potentially also the solution to the world's hardest problems. So if that lunch invite seems a bit too much for you to take at this moment, why don't you go ahead and give that a shot? And if the relationship is half as strong as you perceive it to be, the person on the other side will understand. If they don't then maybe the lunch wasn't such a good idea after all. At the end of the day, only good things can come out of it.

We, especially the immigrants, juggle an inordinate amount of work and life commitments on a regular basis. We work hard to make our lives better and work equally hard to build the relationships we cherish and in the process, we do hit up against our breaking points often, and that's normal. However, it only behooves us to consider our position as an entitlement that affords us the luxury of this discussion in its entirety.

By the way, if you are still curious, I didn't cancel on the Sunday lunch. I showed up and as expected, thoroughly enjoyed myself.