Microstory 173 – Retro tales 2
My mother called on the day the Chinese spacecraft fell into the Indian Ocean and she started telling me about how far away from the Maldives it fell and additional information. While we were on the call I told her about that late 1970’s incident of how my great grandmother had a fear that skylab will fall in our place. I still remember she used to wake up from her sleep terrified on several occasions. One day it happened. A branch of a tree fell down because of heavy rain and wind and she thought it had happened. I was sharing this story later with my wife and this time around I was fascinated to see my mother’s response as well. After all, they are from the same gene pool. Somethings in life we carry from one generation to the other. I will task my younger daughter to explain the space phenomenon to my mother. She will understand more if she teaches someone else and in this case her “grandmother”.
Microstory 174 – Whch window ?
These days one of the major challenges we have is to limit our kid’s exposure to screen time. The other day she was playing some games with her neighbor friend virtually. The sky was overcast outside. Her friend was telling something which we overheard:
She said, “Wow! look at the weather! ”
My daughter immediately started googling the weather.
Her friend said, “No! Look at the window.”
My daughter looked at her laptop and asked, “Which window?”
Her friend shouted, “No! the actual window! Look outside! A storm is coming!”
It took the brewing storm clouds to convince her to stop playing and look outside the balcony and enjoy the weather. It was quite a challenge to move them from the virtual screen to nature’s scene. This reminded me of a WhatsApp meme that came out some time back where Dad asks his son to name the galaxy. The son instantly replied, ” Samsung Galaxy”. How do we limit kids’ screen time without nagging? I googled it. I got this picture. I have to go through some more screen time to understand how to convert this into a language that she can understand. Finally seeing the ‘roots and winds’ reminded me of nature and I need to open a window to search for the meaning.
Microstory 175 – Chatter Boxes
I picked up the e-book “Chatter” a week back. This was inspired by a session with Ian Faria. I read a few pages of the book and I was trying to assimilate my understanding of the concepts which he had mentioned in the book. Later that day I got a call from a person. In the conversation, he asked me a question. That was a moment that tripped me into a downward spiral of thoughts. I was about to blurt out. I held myself. Meanwhile, I listened to him patiently. I did not go along with the chatter that happened inside my head. Instead, I used one technique that Ethan Kross mentioned in the book that is to switch to the third person. For e.g by using your name and asking what will Mr. Vinod do best in these circumstances? More importantly, the stop, scan, and swap formulae helped me facilitate the messaging in a positive direction, and instead of showing my contempt over the phone, I switched to a questioning mode. The other person had asked me an irritating question in the beginning and that is how I was ruffled. Finally, a couple of more questions from my side helped each other reach consensus and I was happy that I implemented one notion from the book. As a result, we can move ” Chatter that Matters” into a box. Let us reimagine chatterboxes.
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