My dad grew up in a small clapboard house on a sandy side street and shared a tiny bedroom with his three brothers and one sister. He was only three when his mom died of unknown causes and the family suddenly had trouble making ends meet.
With his father running a Singer sewing machine shop in nearby Amritsar, my dad’s aging grandmother came to watch him and his siblings, who were taught to scrimp, save, and raise one another for twenty years. My dad had one sister named Swedesh. And what were the four brothers’ names? Vijay, Ravinder, Jatinder, and Surinder.
I’m serious!
You can’t make that up.
School was important, and math was my dad’s specialty. Times tables and algebra were done on a slate, The Pickwick Papers was assigned reading, and gym class consisted of running around a schoolyard full of pebbles and crab grass.
In the evenings he worked long hours ironing shirts at the sewing machine store, helping his dad stay on the sales floor by doing laundry in the back.
To this day, on the rare nights when I stay over at my parents’ place, my dad insists on ironing my clothes. Stumbling to the bathroom at six in the morning, I’ll see the faint silhouette of my dad pressing my dress shirt in the upstairs hallway before I leave for work.
It always makes me smile.
I’ve seen only one picture of my dad as a child, and it’s a blurry black-and-white shot of him standing beside a bicycle with one of his older brothers.
Tall socks, flat faces, and neatly combed hair give a quick glimpse into a simple childhood full of big dreams. My dad loved math and eventually abandoned Charles Dickens to scrape together his savings, tutor in the evenings, and ride his bike to the University of Delhi for five years until he got his master’s in nuclear physics in 1966. After university my dad applied for Canadian immigration and was accepted.
When I asked him why he applied to Canada, he said, “I looked up a ranking of the best places to live. Scandinavian countries were first but didn’t accept immigrants. Canada and the US were next. So I applied to both. And I got the letter of acceptance from Canada first.”
Just like a kid applying to colleges.
The reason his entire life and my entire life exist in Canada is just because he got the letter from Canada first.
How many big decisions have you made just because you got that letter first?
Are you checking your phone right now? I’m guessing there are three social media apps with notification flags waiting to hook your attention away. These days, we’re surrounded by endless distractions. Never mind the twenty-three kinds of toothpaste and fourteen kinds of toilet paper you have to choose from on your drugstore pit stop on the way home.
There is magic in doing things simply.
In doing things easily.
Without all the thinking, thinking, thinking we apply to every single decision today.
How about this one?
First country you get a letter from?
Move there for the rest of your life.