Hi, my name is Vaibhavi Goyal, and welcome to Choose Fullness.

There is always something left unsaid in the space between generations. A pause, a small uncertainty, a meaning that never fully makes the journey from one person to the next.

Maybe that is why the game of telephone keeps resurfacing in my mind, the way a simple whispered phrase drifts and bends as it travels around a circle. By the end, the message is recognizable only in spirit, not in shape.

As children, we laughed at how wrong it became. We cared about the surprise, the absurdity, the way something so simple could unravel so quickly. Now, I think about how easily that unraveling mirrors the stories passed down to us. Traditions rewritten one generation at a time, values retold with subtle edits, expectations softened or hardened in the retelling.

In the game of telephone, no one gets to ask questions.
No one gets to say, “Wait, can you repeat that for me?”
No one gets to clarify the intention behind the original words.
You just pass along the version you heard, hoping it is close enough.

I find myself wondering if we are doing the same thing with the pieces of culture we carry. If we are whispering traditions we only half remember and still expect them to land with the same meaning they had centuries ago. We inherit rituals, roles, and rules the way we inherit the faded edges of a story. Sometimes we honor them, sometimes we reshape them without realizing it. And sometimes, without meaning to, we lose them.

My grandparents’ generation believed in introductions arranged by families who understood marriage as a shared responsibility. Now we search for connections on screens, guided by algorithms that do not know a thing about lineage or the quiet hopes tucked inside a parent’s heart. It is not wrong, but it is different, and I think it is worth asking how much of the original meaning follows us into this new way of living.

We often celebrate change as progress.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it simply reflects our desire to move fast, to choose what feels convenient, to build our own lives without the weight of what came before. And yet, I wonder if progress feels empty when it forgets its roots. Not outdated roots, but the kind that holds a story steady.

The game of telephone was never just a children’s distraction. It showed us how fragile intention becomes when words are passed along without understanding. It reminded us that meaning does not disappear all at once. It slips, slowly, in small substitutions and overlooked details. 

Maybe the point is not to preserve every tradition exactly as it was, maybe, the point is to understand it well enough to choose what we keep and what we gently let go of. To listen long enough to know why something mattered in the first place.

Modernity does not have to be a rejection, tradition does not have to be a cage. Most of life happens somewhere in between, in the quiet space where we are still deciding how far to move from the original whisper. And before we pass along our own version of the message, it might help to pause and ask ourselves what part of it still feels true. 

Not out of duty to the past, but out of honesty with ourselves. There is always something left unsaid, maybe this is our chance to say it with care.

So remember—your glass is full. Whether you see it that way is up to you.