— my dad

I love this. Once I heard him say this on the phone with a friend. He also has another one that I like: “life is fair, it’s people who aren’t fair.” My dad is one of the most interesting men that I know. Brilliant. Hilarious. Intuitive.

He and my late mom raised 8 children in the United States (he and my late mother are Jamaican; 7 of the children were the firsts of my whole family to be born in the U.S.). Of the 6 daughters, all are college-educated and the youngest is close to finishing an Electrical Engineering degree. I mention this since my parents never went to college, unlike most of my Black friends offline or my Black social media buddies, whose parents did. My parents are still brilliant, nonetheless. My late mom was a creative seamstress who cut and sewed from sight. Who needs patterns? It was like hello art, meet math and science…all in her head. My dad is a semi-retired commercial fisherman who has decades of grueling hard and complicated work under his belt. He’s also an incredible visual artist. He understood and used to help me with my Trigonometry homework in high school. That was one of my favorite A’s. A lot of kids don’t have parents (college educated or not) that can help with any math beyond Algebra I. I know this because I use to tutor when I was a high school student and later on as an adult, I tutored adults who returned to college later in life.

I love this quote by him because I’m still trying to teach myself how to rest. I know how to sleep. Duh. I know how to have quiet time (I’m an introvert, so this is a speciality, heh.) But truly calm resting? Letting the stress go? Feeling a yoga-like balance without doing yoga? Nah dawg. I haven’t done that since I was traveling in China in 2008. Not that I should have to be outside of the U.S, to truly rest, but damn, it’s been four years since I’ve felt that kind of feeling. I hope to rekindle my knowledge of truly resting in 2013.