Syncope.

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...