My daughter gets her undergraduate degree today. The convocation ceremony is on in Delhi. I am sitting in Chennai, all because the university asked parents not to come due to ‘paucity of space’ in their premises. I thought that was unkind and unprecedented. But, it is not a day to let irritation and anger cast a cloud on a sunny side that is aglow with joy and pride.

I have sometimes wondered how she coped with the demands of college work and semester assessments. I imagine that it must have been emotionally demanding to not let her sense of grief and loss after MH370 disappeared get the better of her own high expectations of herself. I know for a fact that she scaled the bar she set. I know less to this day about how she she has coped emotionally with the shock of not having her mother to speak to, to consult, to share, and to do things together. She grew comfortable in her solitude, intimate and secretive with her writing. Separated by a couple of thousand kilometres, I was often left to interpret her monosyllables, hmmms, silences, inflections in voice, and pauses mid-call, and speculate about what might be happening to her.

What has been helpful to her, and certainly to me is that so many of you have reached out, extended or renewed friendships, and been there in difficult times.

College life has made her a more self-assured, self-reliant and outgoing woman, better equipped with essential life skills, than the inhibited and self-contained girl that joined college three years ago. I am learning what it means to be available and not be oppressive, to suggest and be supportive, not insist and be demanding, to be candid without being deflating, exhort without creating an expectation, and to be patient and wait rather than be anxious about her unfolding.

She has multiple interests and is talented. That makes choice-making for further studies or pursuits tough. One issue is to know where the heart lies. Another is to trust that what the heart desires is worth pursuing, no matter what. Perhaps a third is to learn that one can never be certain about anything in life, but it is possible to make the best of what it has to offer. Related to it, an acceptance that mistakes are just raw material for learning (as Argyris would say). They are bends on a road that point to new pathways rather than the end of the road.

It remains my fervent wish that she quells the clamour of voices to be and do this or that, and allow silence and inner quiet to point the way. I wish she eventually comes upon things that does ample justice to her innate gifts, imbues her life with a sense of purpose and meaning, and capacities to deal with the banal and the creative, the beautiful and the beastly.

This post originally appeared on Facebook.