I had a very interesting week.
I learnt that Perishable goods are
worth a lot more than durable ones.
Sale happening in Zara is worth a lot
more as it lasts only few hours compared to Relaxo where some goods
are on SALE forever.
When something does not have a due
date, its importance dies down. Nothing is more perishable than LIFE.
You do not know when your time is up. But strangely enough, we do
not treat life that well, WHY!!??
That is because, Life is short, only if
you have an eye on the bigger time-frame. On an hour 2 hour basis, it
has the power to seduce you into a fallacy of semblance, sanity and
predictability.
This is the reason signal to noise
ratio improves as you increase the time-frame.
But human mind is the most versatile,
auto adjust and amazing organism, which creates a comfort zone in any
circumstance you place it. It will build stories and narrative to
justify anything. While this trait has a positive, as it helps us
survive, on the flip side, it creates an artificial sense of
permanence in this perishable life.
It requires constant reminder of this
perish-ability, else it forgets it and gets comfortable with status quo. This is the reason why Saint Kabir use to visit a graveyard
(shamshan bhumi) everyday to remind his otherwise wandering mind of
the inevitability of the end.
Its amazing how life seems more
precious when some incident is presented to show you that it is
perishable and after adequate time has passed, mind takes over again
and you go back into your worldly abode.
03 days ago, while playing badminton, I
had a sudden syncope episode and I blacked out. While it was not for
more than 3-4 seconds, (as told to be by my friends Kunal and Mohit), for me it felt a lot longer and I went into some kinda
subconscious dream state.
After that, Dr Google took over and
after 03 hours of net surfing, i was able to conclude that Syncope
has no importance if its vasovagal in nature. Which is to say if it
was caused by dehydration, sudden movement, some kind of situational
trigger.
Whereas Syncope is a very serious and
most probably the last symptom in case of a heart disease.
A syncope episode in a person suffering
from a heart disease manifests into his death in less than next 03
months.
Well reading the above paragraph and
add my family history and tryst with suddenly collapsing, I
appropriately went into depression.
I use to consider myself a very
rational human being, but Not anymore. I do not have that delusion
no more. It is one thing to write about spirituality and stuff like
everything is pre destined and totally another when somebody tells
you, your time is up.
Mind is a wonderful creature if it is
in your control and a horrible monster when it is not. And when a
flash news come, it (mind) is not in your control, far from it. Your
mind goes bonkers. It starts the mathematics and extrapolates. It
calculates the odds and soon does what it does best, draw conclusions
and inferences based on incomplete information.
My wife is a doctor and she being from
the preventive medicine domain immediately arranged for ECG,
Echocardio and finally TMT. She also advised me NOT to read too much
on internet as Noise to signal ratio of becoming your own doctor with
Dr Google is very very sad.
Of-course i didn't listen to her and
screwed my mind up by reading all kind of crap about sudden deaths
and myocardial infarction and cardiac arrhythmia.
I noticed another thing. The best way
to figure out how advanced you have reached in your spiritual or
professional growth is to see how your mind reacts when faced with
adversity.
For a system trader, that could be his
biggest draw down. For an investor it can be a situation where he has
just placed the biggest bet of his life and a very respected investor
friend of his has a very negative view on the same company.
For a meditator, it can be a news that
his time is up and he has 02 more months.
I am writing this down to create a
journal entry because I know that mind will take over after a few
days/months and I will again forget about the perishable nature of
life.
Anyways, after a Sleepless night and
frantic panic, The test results showed that my heart is working fit
and fine and that syncope was due to sudden movement and dehydration
combo and now I can continue with my spiritual charade claiming that
my cool and calm demeanor was not affected one bit and I was able to
apply Ed Seykota's 06th maxim of 'file the news' rather easily.
Experiment continues.. life goes on...
