A Thousand Deaths

As is usual for the Bay Area in the month of June, it is a beautiful sunny morning with mild and breezy weather. One can find no excuse not to go out for a long walk, which can lift both body and mind. However, my mood reflects dark and pregnant cloud about to burst into tears. It is as if my mind has withstood a thousand stabs and still pretends to be ready for more to come. There are no bloody spills that stands witness to this, yet, with every perceived stab I lost something, something I held so dearly. Can one grieve the living?

Anyone who lived more than seven decades on this planet will agree that life is complex. You know misery will last longer than moments of pleasures. You know adrenaline rush is a delta function embedded on an ocean of hormones that ebbs out based on the mundane events of the day. Here, mundane is used in the most positive sense. Thanks God, evolution has prepared us to handle mundane days. So did evolution not prepare us to handle a thousand deaths.

I see punching bags laughing at me and saying “Hey, I receive thousands of punches everyday but still keep hanging in there”. This brings me to the rituals that helps us mourn the death of loved ones in achieving normalcy. In the Hindu religion the four stages of grieving including the denial, the acceptance of loss, the actual mourning and restoration of quasi-normalcy are packaged in 13 days. Daah! But when you grieve the living, you are alone and perpetually stuck in the denial stage. You are arrogant to think you are in control and things will turn around if only …

Accepting loss of the living must invoke spirituality. God is the easy path to spirituality. However, how to start believing in somerthing that you never believed. Scientific thinking has long questioned the presence of God even though believers are believed to live a more normalized life, in general. Do nonbelievers lack imagination? Wait a minute, it could be the other way around. God may be in what you believe and what you love doing. According to the Hindu philisophy, God is omnipotent and omnipresent. This takes me to what I love doing. I find teaching very rewarding. I love cooking and it is the most meditative thing I do every day. Can these activities help provide the ultimate daily balance of adrenaline and other hormones required to reach a balance? If it did, I will not be writing this piece and I will not be struggling in Jack London’s Torture Ship.