The power of thought & reflection at times of uncertainty

If you are worried about not being able to step outside, you really should consider reflecting yourself. It is very important we identify what bothers us, and define parameters of our thought processes. The sooner you do this, the better you could cope up in situations like this (ongoing COVID pandemic). Let me elaborate on this to you as briefly as possible.

In 2017, I planned a party with a couple of my friends. We booked a hotel in Colombo, invited more friends, and started our small gathering. We also reserved a hotel room in Negambo to spend the following day. It was a good time, and I met friends and things were not too crazy. However, while I was in Colombo, I suddenly spiked a fever. Being surrounded by friends, I still took a couple of drinks knowing very well about the fever. Then I slept. The next day morning, I could not even get up from the bed. The only time I tried, I fainted. Luckily, one of my friends rushed to a nearby pharmacy and got me some Panadol Actifast. After an hour, I was back in my usual state. However, being extremely ignorant, I started my car and with two of my friends, I went to Negambo. From Negambo, I went straight to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). I was in the ICU for 3 days, and then 4 more days in a hospital ward. I had Dengue.

I always knew that anyone could get Dengue, but I never thought I could get it. That is exactly what most of us think, or at least how some of us think. If I thought otherwise, I would not have partied with my friends that day.

The experience changed my life forever. It taught me the importance of thought and reflection.

On the 4th or the 5th day at the hospital, I was waiting for my X-ray in a wheelchair. I could barely lookup. On one hand, I was holding the sarong (a skirt like a cloth men wear), and from the other, I was holding my catheter bag half-filled with my own urine. The journey from a 5-star hotel to a common ward in a state hospital surely is a humbling experience. However, more than that, as I was in the wheelchair my entire life flashed in front of my own eyes. That was my very first lesson on the uncertainty of our lives. A few days ago, I thought the world revolves around me. Soon, I realized how immaterial my life is, because, while I was helplessly waiting in that wheelchair, the entire world seemed to continue without me.

This incident changed me. In 2018 January 1st, I went back to Minnesota. I made it my new year resolution to spend the life of a minimalist. I spent one and a half years with minimum interaction, primarily by confining myself to a room with extremely minimal facilities. No fancy phones, no additional clothes, nothing. I survived from the bare minimum, and I continued to push my limits. All I had was my laptop and books, which I continued to read. I started to spend more time reading up on things that actually mattered. I embraced uncertainty and reflected on what I could have done during the past 25 years. Could I have done things differently? Yes!

There is no use of lamenting over bygones. Self-reflection is to guide ourselves to have a better future and embracing yourself for who you are. Thus, I started to practice guided meditation, and self-hypnosis. The objective was to have a positive mood every day. Everything else did not matter, because I was on the other side of the world. In a land that no one actually knows me or how I lived. I used this time to observe the deeper meaning of self in an attempt to identify the true parameters of my thought process. There were days I was in a hypnotic trance for hours. Each experience was unique in its own way.

In fact, in 2019, my newly learned skills were tested once again. I had a pretty bad case of flu in February and March. I could not sleep well and had some bad fever. Apparently I had influenza. Soon after influenza, I was diagnosed with another infection. The doctors said I had a pilonidal cyst. I have never in my life have felt that much pain. Soon, I lost my ability to move, because it was painful to even get up. For 10 days, I was on the bed. I was given extremely strong medication to deal with pain, which I did not use. I had some Ibuprofen and mostly it was "self-hypnosis for pain reduction." Nobody would believe this, but your thoughts could actually help you control pain. It was the only thing that gave me some decent sleep in those troublesome nights.

This incident re-validated my initial perception of the uncertainty of life back in 2017. No one gets sick because they like getting sick. No one deliberately gives it to you. There is no gain in pointing fingers at communities or accusing them of a virus that nobody can see. However, this time definitely is an eye-opener. Look outside. What do you see? This is a time that tests your willingness to embrace how fragile our lives are. This teaches us the importance of doing things that actually matter and be kind to one another. I have learned my lesson in a painful manner, but have you? For everyone who is busy in social media spreading hatred, wittingly or unwittingly, you got to think about what you do twice. Think of yourself walking on the shoes of a person who is sick and helpless.

When Voyager went a billion miles away from the Earth, it took one last photograph of Earth. In that image, our Earth literally looks like a tiny dot. Upon seeing this image, later, Carl Sagan wrote an excellent reflection, that really speaks to the edifice of life that explains the essence of mankind.

I have given Carl Sagan's message below for you to read.

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator, and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, and every hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

"The Earth is a very small stage of a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood, spilled by those generals and emperors, so that in the glory of triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds? Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only known world so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future to which our species could migrate. Visit? yes. Settle? not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the earth is where we make our stand."

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores the responsibility to deal kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot. The only home we have ever known."