Meeting new people and being comfortable with them is a skill which I am slowly and surely developing. These past seven years have forced me to come out of my withdrawn self and to meet and engage individuals from three continents. Relating with individuals is so different in France from America, even more different in China and Borneo! I have to adjust according to the local cultural values and priorities, the status of the individual, the context in which we were relating, the expectations both parties had and most of all the need to make the other comfortable.As a student, I found relating to peers very challenging as most were much younger and as such had a completely different approach to life than I did. As a mother, I have to host a series of cognitive disparities in our random discussion topics about friends, fashion, beauty, education, technology etc. with a malleable teenager.
Endurance is the breath to harmonize the conversations before remorseful eruptions would occur. Patience is the antidote to the mind that this phase is ephemeral and like everything else, this too will pass. Communing with my small coterie of intimate friends is heartily virtual. Life has brought us to different places and assigned us different responsibilities and priorities but we have not lost our common values of caring and sharing. Indeed, it is the connection of the hearts rather than a case of logorrhea.
