How Do You Live Your Life?

There has been several times, where I have been confronted with choices that will affect the rest of my life, such as: whether or not to go to college, moving away vs. staying in California, what I want to be when I grow up, and so on.  Everyone is faced with choices, some minor and some major, all the time.  I don’t know about everyone else, but there are times when things are getting tough and I try to imagine what things would be like if I chose something different somewhere in the past.  It’s not necessarily regret but more of trying to confirm to myself that I made the right decision.

In the novel, Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, Jane is faced with many different choices which lead her from being a little girl from Punjab, India to being a soon-to-be mother living with a farmer in Iowa.  The question that was proposed to me while I was reading the first eight chapters was, whether I thought Jane had an active control over her life or a passive one.  After reading the book to page 58, I would have to say that I think that she is split between running away from her past and running toward a future that she doesn’t necessarily know what she wants to be yet.

Jane has become a strong woman from all that she has experienced since living in India.  She has seen and dealt with things that a lot of people in America can’t even imagine.  Through all of this, she gets an idea of what she doesn’t want to become and is running away from everything she knows she doesn’t want to be.  The quote,” I didn’t have a child, but I had a past that I was still fleeing. Perhaps still am(34)”, indicates that some explanation might be coming up about why she is running away from her past. 

In the same context, you can look at the story and interpret that she is running toward America because of a better life.  She has already told us that being the 5^th girl in the family doesn’t give her the best chances of being married off to a deserving suitor.  Instead of sitting in India and probably ending up with a mediocre life, she is taking the initiative and going to America.  We know that she moved to Iowa from New York, and her friend, Taylor, thinks it is a crazy idea.  Instead of living in one of the biggest cities in the world where thousands of people have moved to start over, she has chosen to keep on going to the Midwest.  This might sound absurd to some but she is from a farming family, and it looks like she has chosen to go somewhere (the farmlands) where life is at least somewhat familiar to her. 

It might seem like a cop-out to say that she is being active and passive.  In the last sentence of the first chapter she says, ”I know what I don’t  want to become(5)”.  To me what she is actually saying is that she wants to run away from everything she knows but has no real direction to run to because she doesn’t have a defined plan of what she does want to become.  And I don’t think it is that uncommon for anyone to have an active and passive way of living there lives.  It’s all part of balance, you take control of some aspects and you let yourself be controlled by other aspects.  This doesn’t make you a stronger or weaker person, it just shows that there are certain decisions that are important enough to take charge of and there are other decisions that aren’t as important to you.