Best of Week: Blessings

The Kite Runner apprises an incredible amount of universal teaching and guidance, applicable to each and every reader's life, creating an indispensable connection between the reader and Hosseini. Throughout the week's reading and discussion, I explored two predicaments throughout the class's observations that epitomized the "lesson" that our writer illustrated throughout Amir's story. One a re-visitation to the past and another a barrier to his future. The lesson that I learned is one of counting your blessings and making the best of what you have, no matter how great or how small your capabilities may be.

Throughout our class's examination of the book we continually came across the topic of historical re-visitation. That is, the re-visitation of Amir's past (hence the memoir). Now, Amir deliberately recognized the excruciating pain, hardship and impact that his experience of viewing Hassan's rape left him, yet he didn't "capitalize" upon the joy that was brought into his life ( i.e. Rahim Kahn's appearance, Soraya, and his father's acceptance). His lingering upon his past truly gave him this pain and remembrance. 

The second situational problem is Soraya's infertility, this passage in the book exemplifies the problem through Amir's feeling and emotion:

"And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room,I’d feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child."

It brings an incredible amount of hardship impacting both their marriage and their family. Upon this, due to their defined culture "filling in that gap" is much harder to fill than not (i.e. General Taheri's view on blood relations). 

Given these two "problems", I realized that we can come across cross roads like this in our lives and we can take either path. The one that makes the best of our situation or the one that leads to further contempt and pain. Knowing Hosseini through his writing, I know that he'll find a way to make the best of both situations in Amir's life. To fulfill both holes in his life through the life of another.