THE TEST BEYOND OUR STRESS
Ever since turning 40, I am a reluctant participant to my own annual medical check-up. To say I don’t like it would be an understatement. An entire morning of fasting, waiting, hunger pangs, bursting bladder, the sheer boredom! …. There’s all of that and then there’s the STRESS TEST!
Here I am, huffing and puffing my way through the test, matching whatever speed the God-like technician is choosing to set with no clue of how I’m faring. The non-responsive not-knowing experience drives me up the wall. Arre behen, kuchh toh bata do. Why the pan-face darling? But no. She continues and grudgingly, so do I.
While the stress in a test one has willingly commissioned is at least understandable, the never-ending tests of life are baffling. The sheer purposelessness of it all, feeling lost, alone, sometimes angry with God, along with the dejection that there seems to be no end in sight.
In a strange way, while each one of us is in pain, our individual traumas are incomparable. Specially in the past few months, some of us have the inconvenience of being confined against our natures but for many, life has been shred apart with death, trauma, unemployment, illness, changing the design of what normal means for them. The contrast is unnerving.
Survivor’s guilt weighs on me and on many of my dear friends. Why is it that we have been spared? Continue to be spared?
A couple of years ago, as Senior was beginning his transition into young adulthood, he started getting edgy with our dinner table conversations. I tend to discuss things that have affected me during the day. On some nights, it means expressing deep anger about real cases of physical or mental oppression against women that I’ve heard of at work or in the news. One day he couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Why do you complain Ammi? Nobody is bothering you. Abba is not a bad guy!”
“But when did I say he was?!”
“Then why do you talk about women being beaten on harassed? You should be grateful for what you have instead of complaining about stuff that hasn’t happened to you. They should speak for themselves!”
“But babu, It is precisely because I am grateful and safe myself, that I MUST speak about those who can’t.”
The conversation of course did not end there. But it gave me direction that I latch on to when most things don’t make sense. Our conduct in this chaos of life can define our reason for being. We may not know why we are chosen to be where we are, entrusted with the roles that we play. But there is definitely a purpose to our existence.
And we get a chance to fulfil it by looking beyond our own worlds, our own miseries. Sometimes it can become the only thing that saves us. Pulling another along lifts us in a way few things can. Going beyond the necessary, to lighten another’s burden, to speak for them, or show solidarity, may give incredible meaning to our own life.
Aasman pe hai khuda, aur zameen pe hum.
Aaj kal woh is taraf dekhta hai kum.
Highly recommended, this song is a satire on God sitting happily up there ignoring us. Hoping for divine intervention, it may seem like She has indeed forgotten to check in leaving us bereft. But while we wait for Her to get back Her mojo, are we willing to question, ‘what are WE doing down here?’ So much to do as we battle the unimaginable together while enduring our stress tests alone.
