Bored....

People ask me how does it feel to stay home, alone for most part of the day...The answer is bored of course! Finding the ‘right thing’ to do can be a lot more challenging than doing the thing ‘right’! One stays at home for a lot of reasons like taking care of the household, kids,  dislike of commute (to workplace) and I can go on...

I stayed at home after moving to a new place, quitting a job that was challenging and lovable at the same time! Thinking that after all the hard-work, I deserved a break from the rut of it all and more importantly to adapt to the new environment.

I do enjoy my ‘alone’ time, doing things that I never had the time to do before, be it as simple as catching up with friends I had lost contact with. Then there are the never ending chores of the day that need to be taken care of. But I also miss getting ready to a new challenge for the day, the fear of not being prepared well enough, getting caught off-guard, the rush every morning and the stress at the end of each day...I am certainly not the first person and surely not the last one to have this love-hate relationship with my job!

At the end of the day when my head doesn’t hurt with a throbbing pain and stress of the day, when I dont have to worry about who said what about whom, how much of it is true and more importantly not being conveniently dumped on or 'delegated’ with the work that is not remotely mine, I don’t know whether to be happy or sad...And here I thought the answer to that question is obvious!

Can work really be fun? Fun I am choosing to deprive myself of? Is it the only identity? I dont have answers for these questions yet but when I think of the extra hour of sleep on a rainy day, curled in my blanket when the whole world rushes through the traffic and all, I think I am not totally out of line to think that it is a privilege to stay back and take a break!

Let me for a while ‘work from home’...no not through the schemes that promise you ‘so many dollars’ for ‘so many hours’. Let me enjoy the time as a vacation well earned. Because sooner or later I will have to go back and be a part of the rut and when the extra work is dumped on me let me not curse myself for not enjoying today!


---Still bored
Urooj Fathima

Relocated

Having lived in a particular place for over 28 years , I think I will call it my roots....so when time came for me to shoot out of these roots, I was um-mm excited! It was going to be adventurous, thrilling and ‘new’ in every sense of the term! After-all, how often do we get a chance to completely ‘start over’ in life? Is it something we want? dread?  easy? or for that matter worth it?Will I find this new place livable without any shred of my ‘previous’ life? what about family....can I begin a life without them? All this and more was on my mind... but the general tone was that of excitement. 

I had never lived away from home. never traveled outside India and it was my dream to live in an amazing, astounding, developed yet quaint place. Ireland is just that! I was ecstatic that me and hubby were relocating here. I couldn’t  have asked for more....

Ireland is beautiful....that is the first adjective that comes to mind. Its green, cold, wet, pollution-free (relatively) with great infrastructure. Living here was easy.

Coming from Bangalore, if I knew one thing like the back of my hand , it is the perturbing ‘T’ word ...‘traffic’. No, I don’t mean just the serpentine line of vehicles. For a Bangalorean, it means bikes and cars and buses and of course the jay-walkers, cutting you short and swearing at you because you inconvenience them by just being there on the road. It means incessant honking even before the red light turns amber, forget about it going green! Smoke, noise, and how can I ever forget the entourage of a single minister that uses the arterial road at the peak hour bringing the burgeoning  traffic to a grinding halt. Living in India made me used to a certain way of life that involved running from pillar to post to get the smallest of tasks like getting my damaged tablet replaced.

Naturally, I found Dublin organized. It was like the entire city is a ‘no-honking’ zone.Yes, it is a part of the ‘developed’ world, but that is not what makes it so ‘easy-to-live’. There is a sense of coming to a halt here. No, I don’t mean stagnant.... I mean relaxed and laid back.

This is exactly what me and especially my husband  needed, a break from time itself! Here the clock does not run your life. There is no hurry to gobble up your second morsel even before your tongue has tasted the first.

So, is Dublin an answer to what all humans are looking for? No. Like every place on  earth it has its own set of challenges. Sometimes the ‘relaxed’ borders on lazy and even inconvenient! Try shopping after 7:00 in the evening and you will know what I am talking about. And of course, ‘the great Indian palate’... well, there is hardly any restaurant here that will satisfy that!

What about the dreaded ‘R’ word....When the whole world is doing it, is Dublin an exception to racism? Unfortunately, no. Being a foreigner here has its repercussions. Is it Right? No. But does it happen anyway? Yes! However, it does not impede our lives and that is what makes life good here.

People here love life. Complete strangers saying 'hello' on the street, complimenting me on my bike, complaining about the cold was completely alien to me. I don’t know how they work but I know for a fact that they party real hard here. Come here on a dry and sunny day and you can see celebration and jubilant spirit in the air! Then again, it could be the sun or the extra pint of Guinness that lifts the ‘spirit’. After all its the Irish we are talking about!

Urooj Fathima