Notes from a self-proclaimed guru of mediocrity
These days I amuse my daughters by encouraging them to do things badly. Our youngest daughter and the middle one have found their rhythm in homeschooling and are required to study for and submit assignments in various subjects regularly.
“Mamma, I am starting to do my Maths assignment,” our 12-year-old will say to me.
“Remember to make a few mistakes,” I will say to her.
“Mamma!” She will roll her eyes at me.
“I’m serious,” I will answer.
“Mamma, I have an eight-page Economics assignment,” the 16-year-old will share. “I know what I want to say but I have difficulty explaining it in sentences.”
“Please, Aliza,” I will say to her. “Submit something that gets you a 60 per cent. That’s just fine.”
Of course, the children don’t take me entirely seriously. But I repeat myself consistently. “Please don’t bother with perfection. Just do what comes to you with ease. Nothing is worth the stress and the self-flagellation. It is more important to finish what you need to do.”
I want my children to imbibe this like a mantra. I want to teach myself to relax too. Give myself the permission to be happy with getting by. To be less than perfect and still congratulate myself for doing whatever I manage to do.
In other words, I have become the self-proclaimed guru of mediocrity. At work, I let at least two mistakes pass in every short documentary we make and release online. “One spelling mistake and one bad transition is the kala teeka every video needs,” I say to the editor when we see a mistake in a final version but decide to let it pass.
Over a decade ago, when our first-born child was in grade 1 and began to get homework, I discovered a quirk about myself. Well, quirk is too mild a word perhaps. Like many others, I had started out on my journey as a parent determined to be a gentle, nurturing person. One who would be polite and respectful in her manner and supportive of her child’s needs. This approach came naturally to me at first. As you can imagine, the novelty began to wear off with time and my inner Punjabi looked for excuses to truly express her feelings.
School assignments provided the perfect front. As I would attempt to help our child do her homework, I would find myself quickly getting far more invested in it than the child herself. I would forget that the eight-year-old needed to maintain her agency as she tackled school assignments. It was more important for her to own the process and learn her way through it than to get all the answers correct.
Disturbed by my over-enthusiasm to make my child perform at her peak, I fired myself from the role of the parent who oversees school work. I removed myself from the scene and handed over this part of parenting work to my husband, till our children freed themselves from both of us most of the time.
This year, I am back in their lives, helping them manage adolescent turbulence by trying to convince them to perform less than perfectly and still sleep soundly. The pressure to perform, as if everything is okay, must be resisted at this time when we are collectively reeling from the disruptive onslaught of the worldwide pandemic as well as the breakdown of all systems that had been designed to maintain order in modern lives. Our lives and world have changed radically and this demands that we acquire new ways to cope.
“The less productivity I expect from my video team, the more they seem to deliver,” I said to my husband as we were walking with our dog after dinner this week. I had been speaking to him about how much more care work young people are doing as they assume responsibility for the elderly in their family, handle their own post-Covid anxieties and lingering symptoms and also try to support their friends.
“Everyone has experienced death from up close in the last one year,” I said.
“I have been lucky,” he said. “No one close to me has been affected.” I was surprised at his response. Gently I named friends and family members we have lost to Covid-19.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I guess I am trying too hard not to think about it.”
We need to save our energy to restore our own selves. We need rest and silence to recover from the chaos we have witnessed. We need time off to grieve. There is so much to process in terms of the loss and bereavement we have endured. We must shift priorities — so that our emotional landscape gets the time and space it needs to heal. Accept our inabilities and slow down.
Allowing ourselves to acknowledge pain will bring us back stronger. We don’t need to hide our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we need to break before we can put ourselves back together. It seems to go against traditional wisdom and our training, but allowing ourselves to make mistakes that don’t hurt anyone is the antidote we need in the age of anxiety that we are all stuck in.
— The writer is a filmmaker & author.
natasha.badhwar@gmail.com
