On Sunday mornings, I have readymade Chinese dumplings with a lovely sauce for breakfast. All I have to do is boil them in a pot of water for a few minutes and done! I got to know about these amazing easy-to-make dumplings from my old Chinese housemate about whom I have written a few times at the time. When you take the dumplings out from the freezer, they are all stuck together randomly in the pack. Some are loose, some are stuck. Earlier I used to try to separate them when I got them out. Some would even break a bit, and they would be all over the place in the boiling water. Then I read somewhere that I shouldn't force them to separate. I should just put them in the water as they are, and eventually they'll separate on their own when they start boiling. I don't need to force it.

Today when doing this it struck me that this could be an analogy for human relationships as well. Something I am not too good at. I think I approach them like I did initially with the dumplings. Getting them to fit the shape of what they should be like ideally. However, I realise that when I let them be, let the thing do its own thing, allow it to breathe, to be itself, who it is rather than who I want it to be... they might naturally open themselves up to me, literally and figuratively. This approach is not how I usually operate, this sort of openness to what will become than to force a ‘be’... but perhaps I could learn…