Last week, I wrote about family. I mentioned my cousins and aunt who were visiting the States from Australia for the first time. Wow, what a fabulous three days it’s been for everyone.
I have found a fervent love for talking with my aunt. She’s a nurse at a hospital in Melbourne and I love having conversations with her. She advises me about chilling my anxiety. And I admire her for that. She shares and compares me to her two sons. I appreciate her for that. She always willing to answer my questions about university, life, marketing, and being a doctor. I ponder from that. And she gave me tips on growing taller. I laugh from that.
My aunt is truly someone I enjoy being around. I guess we help each other in some way. She often asks me about what I want to be when I grow up and asks me about my perspective on certain issues. She notices that I’m a self pusher, not a kid who needs parent pushing. I am thankful for her endeavoring to abet me in my journey to being less self denigrating. Self denigration only exacerbates when I compare myself to others. Being Asian, I can’t help but notice how many others participate and practice programs such as Stanford Online, the Art of Problem Solving, SAT practice and Russian Math. I have a tendency to feel almost a little less accomplished when I observe what they study. But she told me something, more or less an example than a story, about her experience being under pressure and following the lead of others. My grandparents were very intrigued with the art of technology. My father leads a career in engineering, as did my grandfather. So obviously, my aunt felt some pressure to follow a similar path. She said when she was younger, she felt exposed to technology a few years too early. Feeling uncomfortable and almost a little bit overwhelming, she said that was one of the sole causes for her deliberate distance from technology. You shouldn’t feel peer pressure and let that change your potential interest in a subject, for not everything is love at first sight, she told me. That’s one of the most important things I’ve learned from my past 72 hours.
My cousin, David, I would also nominate one of my greatest friends. He is great to hang out with! I think the key to this kind of success when dealing with me, with people in general, is his endearing asset of being a listener. He listens with his mind, not ears. David and I went biking this morning around Cambridge and he managed to endure my long, sometimes banal and monotonous, explanations of the places we visited. Sometimes he wouldn’t say a word for minutes on end! I seemed like an amaranthine chatterbox, never ceasing, never restless.
Similar to my relationship with his mother, my aunt, I think we help each other. On Friday, we went swimming together, well mostly I did the swimming and he acted as the coach. He is a very competitive swimmer, though he quit right before this trip. His greatest strokes are breaststroke and butterfly. I asked him if he could teach me the butterfly. We worked on it. And we drilled and he gave me several tips.
In retrospect, I think the greatest aspect I have grasped from David is to shut up more than sometimes, and listen. I’m currently reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and one of the greatest principals offered is to be genuinely interested in other people. This is becoming a more congeal topic. It’s appears more blatant in certain situations I experience on a daily basis.
So thank you David. Thank you Auntee. For visiting my family and the States. For bringing me new values to practice.
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