A piece of me

 "Wings are important but so are the roots", said the dean of my college in her speech at one of the department functions. This led my classmate sitting beside me to ask, "what do you think is more important, wings or roots?" And all I said was "both". But that question stayed with me. As I lay in bed and reflected over my day the question came back to me. I couldn't pick one, but there was one image in the back of my mind. A flock of birds migrating. Maybe it was the word ‘wings’ that brought that image, but when I was thinking about the question, I remembered that although family or in this case my roots are a very strong value to me, I chose wings and the only thing I could relate it to was migrating birds. Birds choose to migrate when there is a lack of chances of survival. They migrate when the climate in their current living situation gets hard to live in or when the availability of food gets uncertain. They move to lands where they believe there...

 The quote "A canola flower never blooms alone, they bloom in a bunch." by Oh Ae-sun, the female protagonist from ' when life gives you tangerines' stood out to me. Back in Undergrad, one of my professors had said, "you are born alone and you die alone". It seemed so obvious, she further added that ofcourse you will have people in your life on the way, but in the end you do it all alone. So learn to be your person. Most of us take the latter as a absolute truth, I did it for sometime as well. Preparing myself to not have help. To do it all alone. And honestly it did help me get through some days. But, I did not come into this world with infinite energy and capabilities. I needed people. Ofcourse I am born alone and I will die alone, no one is going to be there every moment with me. But even as I was born there were doctors and nurses assuring I was born safely, there were parents teaching me to walk, talk, read, write, love. There were siblings, grandparents...