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Spice of life | Near-death encounter that brought clarity
Our flight faced strong turbulence over the Pacific for 45 minutes. Many were praying around me and so was I with hands folded, sometimes holding the seat tight. I sadly wondered how it would be under the ocean
I often recall and share Lonely Planet’s book, The Best Moment Of Your Life: 100 Life Changing Travel Experiences, chiefly for its first essay, Discovering life on the bank of the Ganges, by travel writer Matt Phillips in which he describes his visit to Varanasi, where while witnessing funeral pyres along the river, he suddenly had a big realisation: “The biggest tragedy wouldn’t be dying – it would be not actually living.” After all, when we encounter death closely, it wakes us up, bringing the clarity of life’s journey – what really matters, what doesn’t.
Not many years ago, when I got a chance to interview Bollywood actor Manisha Koirala for her book, Healed: How Cancer Gave Me A New Gift Of Life, at a literature festival, as the title suggests, she shared that her fight with the life-threatening disease completely changed her. “It made me humble and kind. I began valuing everything and everyone around me. I must admit that before cancer came into my life, I was lost in the glamour of Bollywood, where real happiness was absent. I was disconnected from my own soul which guides one best. It is the beauty of our mind which makes us rich, not any stardom or money. Thank you, cancer,” was one of the excerpts from the interview.
Once I attended a rare ramp walk. I had to cover the event for the newspaper I worked for. It was organised by a hospital to introduce its women patients, who had recovered from different kinds of cancer. I was curious to speak to them personally and was lucky to be taken backstage before the show. Their smiling faces reflected their grit and they echoed the same words, clearly inspired from ‘you cannot pour from an empty cup’. “Cancer made us realise that though we took care of our family, but never ourselves. We failed to give importance to our own diet and overall health as most Indian housewives, but now we have changed,” was the refrain.
In April 2016, when I was flying to Chicago for the first time from Hong Kong, our flight faced strong turbulence over the Pacific Ocean for nearly 45 minutes. Never had I experienced this level of disturbance in the air. Many were praying around me and so was I with hands folded, sometimes holding the seat tight. With the fear running, air crash investigations of National Geographic that I frequently watch, began flashing before my mind and I sadly wondered how it would be under the ocean. Many thoughts raced in the head: Those who are not in this flight are so fortunate. Was this my life? Why do we waste so much energy thinking about the future? Isn’t the present everything? Wish I had done this, done that.
Though we landed safely in Chicago, there were very essential realisations about life at 35,000 feet, which I may have otherwise not realised.
But is there life in our life? Seems no, as most of us don’t even live in the present. We stay lost in the past or the future. Many ignore their own heart and instead follow what the majority does, leading ourselves into many blind races, where we lose our originality and discovery. Of all, the race for materialism is the worst, which takes away so much from us.
For those into monotonous routines, never trying new things, Paulo Coelho, the author of The Alchemist, terms such individuals as dead even when they are alive, which was also the message of his thought-provoking book, Veronika Decides To Die.
That’s why Oscar Wilde once said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist, that is all,” while Abraham Lincoln observed, “In the end, it is not years in your life that count but life in your years.” So, why not live before we die? rameshinder.sandhu@gmail.com
The writer is an Amritsar-based freelance contributor
