This is all there is!

It suddenly struck me that we only have 7 or 8 decades of life, and half of it is already gone. Life suddenly feels so short!

When I was in the university in the US, I liked a girl, we used to cook and eat together, spent hours on the phone discussing a lot of things, she called me when she went to buy cloth or jewelry, “Does this look good on me?” she would ask. Once she was looking at the miniest of the mini skirt and asked me, “How about this?”. I examined it for some time and hesitated a little, but asked her with concern, “What if a strong wind blows your skirt up?”. She didn’t expect that and started giggling. Then selected one with shorts, “How about this?”. “Nice”. When she went to the salon, she would call me to show how pretty she looked. Once we went to some grad students’ dinner, I put my hand out to grab a beer they had kept on the table, she was sitting next to me, looked at me and gave me that “Don’t you dare touch it” stare, I wanted to marry her right then. One day she went to India, I dropped her off at the airport, I was in tears the whole drive back as I hadn’t expressed my feelings to her, but thought about telling her when she came back. I didn’t hear back from her for a few months, no replies to my emails either. When I wondered what happened, one day I got an email from her with a subject ‘hi’ and an attachment. The attachment was her wedding invitation. It broke my heart. That was 14 years ago.

I felt lost, just took my car and spent time in the deserts and mountains in the US. That started my soul-searching journeys. Slowly I moved on, started working for a couple of years. I eventually got tired of the groundhog day life at 29, living the same days over and over, like running on a treadmill, keep running but go nowhere at the end of the day, the world becoming a huge Halloween party, everyone donning costumes from clowns to superheroes, constantly validating each other, “Am I good enough?”, and I am weaving a web around me with career, money, travels, relationships, trying to stick myself in the middle of it all like a spider.

I was always spiritual since childhood, spent a lot of time in solitude and contemplation. I used to tell my mom that I was going to the next street to play but would bicycle to the railway station and watch people scurrying everywhere with their luggage, trains arriving majestically blaring their horns, I used to stand near those gargantuan engines gaping at them, my childhood dream once was to become a loco pilot. When I went to college, I deliberately missed the morning college bus, took the state transport buses to travel in solitude and quietly watch the world go by without talking to anyone, reaching college around noon, earning me a nickname in my first year in college ‘part-time student’. The seeking deepened when I turned 30, I wanted to find the joy that doesn’t go away no matter what life threw at me. I started trying a lot of different things, took cold showers at 4 in the morning, ate one meal a day, veganism for a few months, became a spiritual wanderer, not with a loin cloth or begging bowl in the Himalayas, but wandered from coast to coast, country to country, searching for silent retreats in Buddhist monasteries, Benedictine monasteries, Vedic ashrams, South American Shamans, sometimes meditating 12 hours a day. And suddenly, one day, the veil cracked open, and I had a rude spiritual awakening a few years ago during a meditation. I encountered angels, received many blessings from Them, learnt some mysteries about creation, experienced dimensions beyond the physical. It was intense, jolted me to the core, and heightened my senses for a few months, colors looked too bright, was able to hear people whispering from 100 feet away, was able to smell divine aromas around me, was able to feel some people’s feelings when they just walked by, and the most profound of all was, I temporarily lost all the attachments I had in this life, and a wave of immense joy engulfed me. I felt my “ego” dropped. Past and future merged into the present, and everything suddenly looked like… just a story. A realization that a billion stories walked this planet before me, a billion more will walk after me, a billion stories walking around right now, and I am just a grain of sand on the beach of time. I once asked a saint why my heart broke a lot in this life. He said, “For the light of wisdom to seep through, the heart has to open. There are many ways to open the heart, but the quickest is to break it”. Fierce grace.

I realized I roamed around a happy living being until age 5 when slowly I started feeling “I am somebody”. Ego. I suddenly became this “first rank holder”. Oh! “I am better than them”. That girl who gave me a love letter in my 5th standard, it did something. She thrusted the letter into my hands, I still remember it started with a heading, ‘love letter’, that’s how I knew it was one because I had no clue what she wrote, there were a lot of spelling mistakes, I even asked her, ‘Can you tell me what you wrote?’, she giggled and ran away. Did she even know what she wrote? Or, did I even know what I read? But it did kindle something in me, some strange feeling that I hadn’t felt before. And I saw this girl in 9th grade, butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Wow! What a feeling that was! What was that? I wanted to be her friend. Whenever I smiled at her, she smiled at me too, there was some energy going on without words, I wanted to be near her. I liked her very much. Every time I saw her, I felt so happy. Even thinking about her felt happy. Why is that? And a guy harassed some girl in 11th standard over the phone and had said my name, “This is Sriram speaking”. The girl had told everyone in the school the next day that I harassed her, saw her crying outside the principal’s office with her mother, everyone thought I was the harasser, no one believed me when I said who did it. The guy who harassed was tall and handsome, and I wasn’t, so I must be the bad guy. That started my lack feeling, from ‘I am better than them’ first ranker, to this ‘I am not good enough’, ‘People don’t like me’. I got harassed and bullied in high school. Even a teacher harassed me in his class. When my crush looked down on me, it made a big gaping hole in my self-worth. I couldn’t study and failed in 3 subjects, given a “warning promotion” to 12th standard. The school labeled failures as “incorrigibles” and public-shamed them by calling them out in school loudspeakers for a 1-hour special class that started just 30 minutes before school closing, “Incorrigibles may come out to attend special class”. The first day, I felt ashamed to walk out in front of everyone and just sat there after the announcement, but the principal came to the class and yelled, “Sriram, aren’t you an incorrigible? Come out”. He might as well just stabbed me in the heart. It broke my heart every day when I walked out in shame in front of everyone as an “incorrigible”, on top of the harasser label. The school was proud of this and said it out loud, “Students will remember the shame as a lesson and do well next time”. Yes, school, you were right, I did remember it, not as a lesson, but as a trauma for many many years, which took me more than a decade to mend back my shattered self-worth. Every time someone harassed, the lack deepened. Feelings of “fear”, “lack”, “victim”, “sadness” became deep-rooted.

I started going from one place to another looking to fill this void, this job, that job, this country, that country, this boss, that boss… or maybe marriage. I saw many marriages where husbands abuse wives, wives humiliate husbands, parents hurt children, to varying degrees, all walking around with unhealed wounds in their hearts hurting other people. It’s Psychology 101, “Wounded people wound other people”.

Fear, hurt, relationships, politics, bosses, subordinates, man, woman, child, everything tires. I splurged myself in travels trying to fill the void, stood on top of Eiffel Tower in Paris, looked around Dubai deserts from atop the Burj Khalifa, gaped at Taj Mahal, road-tripped around Iceland, ate Falafel in Istanbul, roamed around 25 countries, nothing filled the void inside of my heart. Roaming outside was just a band-aid, the wounds kept coming back up. I decided to roam inside. Went to ashrams and monasteries. I realized the world inside of me is a million times more mysterious than the world outside.

Whenever I go on silent meditation retreats, I sometimes have profound experiences, and sometimes some random hurt would flare up from 25 years ago, and I would be surprised, “Really? That hurt was inside me all along?” I want to give an unconditional forgiveness and an unconditional apology to everyone. Our life is sacred, people in it are sacred, and whatever part they played, days or years, is sacred. I just crossed the intermission in my life movie, I am looking forward to the second half, and I sure know the climax, “Tears, giggles, shame, pride, romance, heartbreak, failure, success, sickness, health… whoa! That was one heck of a movie indeed!” and I would just get up from my seat and go home, unscathed. I’m grateful for a full gamut of experience this life has given me, there was no emotion I did not go through. I hope life will give me some opportunity to meet some people, look them in the eye, and say, “Thank you”. At least, be able to send them an email. I don’t know, if they get an email randomly after many years like ‘I forgive you, you forgive me, thank you’, they may think, “That’s so weird!” I think that’s okay. Life is too short to worry about being weird.

It’s good to live without carrying any hurt. Whoever’s reading this, I don’t carry any hurt from you, and I hope you don’t carry any hurt from me.

Love expanded me, hurt deepened me, and looking at a few strands of gray hair, and through all the tears and giggles, I take a deep breath in with contentment… This moment is it. If this isn’t it, there isn’t any… there’s nowhere else to go… nothing more to do… just be here now.

Bowing my head down in reverence and gratitude, thank you for your part in my life.

Prayers and best wishes to you 🙂