The Answer is 42!

I turned 42 this year in January. As you can imagine, for somebody whose friend circle has a lot of geeks, there was no dearth of reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—the book that has literally bestowed the number 42 its universal fame. One of the practical aspects of having an early January birthday is that by Thanksgiving when you look back into the year anyway to think about what you are thankful for in life, you pretty much end up doing an annual review of yourself between your last birthday and the coming one. And I can honestly say this year of my life has been eventful.

This is the year when I have surprised myself by going to not one, not two, but eight musical concerts plus a live stand-up comedy show! I also read ten-plus books that had nothing to do with law school, celebrated our son’s tenth birthday in Hawaii by zip-lining with him over waterfalls in a rainforest, wrote the most number of blogs in a year since 2010, and got back to hands-on STEM volunteering after a long gap by serving as a mentor for young schoolgirls at the Tech Museum at San Jose.

This is also the year where I have truly enjoyed law school and took advantage of everything that it has to offer to broaden my horizon. I took a 3-credit course on Gender and Law so that I have a legitimate excuse to research and write a paper on the controversial topic of “scheduling motherhood” by freezing eggs on the employers’ dime. And I took a semester-long break from my law firm job to work at the chambers of a federal Judge—my first-ever female boss—and loved every moment of it!

The other day I was listening to an interview with prominent TV producer Shonda Rhimes, whose book Year of Yes has become an instant bestseller. She described how a family get together in Thanksgiving 2013 led her to decide that “for one year, she would say YES to everything that scared her.”  Unlike Shonda, I don’t recall having a conscious moment of epiphany to do things differently in 2015. But perhaps something clicked this year. Perhaps I have discovered the magic of letting go and opening up to well-meaning gestures and actions of friends and family rather than relying too much on myself. I now recognize that when I reluctantly said yes to a law school buddy to give ‘group study’ a shot before an exam, or, listened to the advice of a colleague to try out audiobooks, or, agreed to my neighbor’s proposal of going to a concert together, quite unknowingly I had my little moments of triumph that collectively made 2015 so special. This is the year when I became available for my friends again to celebrate the happy occasions of their lives. This is the year when I found the beauty and liberation in trusting my sibling completely to take care of my dad when he suffered a heart attack unexpectedly! I am relishing the process of maturing towards a point where I do not squander the support system that I already have beyond my own home. I am thankful for that conscious recognition of the blessing that is all around me.

May be the supercomputer in Hitchhiker’s Guide did get it right after seven and a half million years of thought. May be the answer is 42. Now what was the question?