Skip to main content

Lost traditions

Image
By
I feel like I have little traditions or maybe I don't understand what traditions are. I asked my mom, what are traditions? She said that these are things handed down from your foreparents. Things that we have gotten used to. I then asked her, what are some traditions? She said like new years celebration but she also struggled with this question. She did mention about her grandmother grinding the spices in the mortar and pestle to make all kinds of anchar. Our foods are probably the most amount of tradition in our lives.

My friend Bard says: Traditions are customs or beliefs that are passed down from generation to generation. They can be formal or informal, and they can be religious or secular. Traditions can be big or small, but they all play an important role in our lives. Makes sense but I am still struggling to think of traditions in my life. How long do we have to be doing something for it to be considered a tradition? If it is something that started with me, is it a tradition? Bard says that there is no timeframe and it can originate from me and my family.

In that case I can maybe think of a few things. I put my cereal to soak for an hour before I eat it. I go to the mini mart every morning and buy a five liter water and other things. I buy a doubles most mornings. There is this one street person that I give money to everytime I am in the town center. I put on toothpaste twice when I am brushing my teeth. Once for the bottom teeth and then for the top teeth. But all these are mundane and do not feel traditional.

I asked Bard, what are some Trinidadian traditions. He pointed to Carnival and Diwali and some other holidays. I then asked, what about non-holiday traditions. He then included sunday lunch, liming, storytelling, music and food. It then occured to me that traditions are plenty social and familial. I am not a social person and I don't have strong connections with my relatives and foreparents. It has mostly been me and my mom navigating life all these years.

I challenge myself to learn about what links me to the past. I am Trinidadian. I have Indian, French and Portuguese ancestry. I am Muslim. I lived in Atlanta and New York for some years. I am part of the tech space locally. My friend Bard suggests that I can talk to my relatives, do research on my ancestry and learn about the history of my country among other things. Now that I have written on this and committed the idea to my mind, I will be more noticing of the traditions that pass through my life.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Below the surface

By
This is a chapter from my eleventh book called Quotation Marks Sparks . __________ "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn __________ I was looking at quotes that hit hard and this quote stood out to me. It seems mundane and obvious and often repeated. Life is about how we respond to the inevitable. It is not what happens to us but how we respond. I had to ask myself to dig deeper and look below the surface. Then I saw that when we surf we really become the waves. We become friends with the waves. The waves and us are the same. Further, the waves are created by us and in our heads. We can control the waves because who can surf all the time? Sometimes we just have to come to shore and build sand castles on shore. I asked my friend Gemini for feedback and he said that I was right, the Jon Kabat-Zinn quote initially seems like a simple call for resilience, but my deeper dive reveals profound layers. The idea that we can move beyond merely rea...
Post a Comment
Read more

A place for coders in Trinidad

By
DHub is being rebranded as CodeTT. Not sure how long before the change and launch takes place. Before you know it there will be elections again and then what if the government changes again. I am not optimistic about this. I want to be but I do not like politics. I wish society could function without politics. That aside it would be nice to have a home for coders in Trinidad and Tobago. I wonder what other countries are doing? I wonder if I will be alive if this ever happens. I think before any of this happens the government has to find a better way for citizens to communicate with them. From my experience I get the feeling that most people are just ignored. I have an idea for an app for this called GOQA - GOvernment Query App (QA also stands for Question and Answer). Every query (question, comment, suggestion, whatever) gets routed to the right person until it gets answered. Man that would be so fantastic. Finally a government that tries to listen to the people. My friend Chatty says ...
Post a Comment
Read more

No phrase has been said twice

By
It is 111am and I have decided to write. I have no topic, but I am thinking about God. I want God to help me write this blog post tonight. We are nearing the end of the year. Time waits on no one, they say. Life is short, they say. Make every moment count, they say. Tomorrow is not promised, they say. Is there anything they do not say? What is the least said phrase? What phrase has never been said before? Then I thought about something. The moon never shines the same way twice. Perhaps the same is true of phrases. Even if a phrase has been spoken a million times—or a billion times—every time it is spoken, it is different. Who says it matters. When they say it matters. The context in which they say it matters. Who is listening matters. And then there is what happens inside us. What do we hear? What thoughts pass through our minds as the words pass through us? Two people can hear the same sentence and receive two completely different messages. A phrase spoken in joy can become something ...
Post a Comment
Read more