Sundays..

Today's lecture along with "A reasonable life" by Ferenc Mate brought up many topics that I could relate to. One of these topics was the topic about going back to the Sundays that used to be devoted to your family. He compares his childhood and how he used to wake up to his neighbor arguing, to his vacation in Florida with his wife. This change in his life is similar to my experience of life in the US and life in India.
In India, as I mentioned many times before, we live in a village in Punjab, which is in North India. Our village, when we used to live their, the first eight years of my life, I knew everyone in my neighborhood. I grew up living with my extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all living in a huge house built by my grandfather). I used to play with my cousins and my neighbors after school everyday. We had half day at school on Saturdays, and on Sundays we had the whole day off. So, basically Sundays were the days we all got together and just did fun stuff. Our morning started out with breakfast with the whole family, and then all the kids from my neighborhood, we all used to rotate houses, and every Sunday we used to go to a different child's house to watch television. It was the only day when our parents didn't mind us doing anything, so we used to go to one child's house and stay there for the whole afternoon and just watch TV while his/her mother gave all of us snacks. No one worried about whether the other family would poison their children or harm them in any way. Basically this environment was the kind that Mate calls the reasonable life, where everyone trusts their neighbors and everyone's happy as an extended family.
In the United States, even though our relatives/family friends, do live near us, it isn't the same as it was when I was a child. Here life is extremely fast and no one has time to actually sit down and do something. Everything is planned and there has to be an occasion for everyone to come and interact with one another. I can't just go to my aunt's house and just stay and have a conversation with them, they have a scheduled life and they both work and so do their children. They don't get to have conversation with their immediate family let alone with me. Luckily my family takes off Sundays and it's a family day. Now that we go to college, the weekends my brother and I go home, the whole weekend becomes a family weekend.
Even though my nuclear family still is close to one another, it is not the same as it is when I was a child in India. While reading "A reasonable life", I kept thinking about my childhood and how everything seems same even though it is a different country.