Pandemic Lessons
The Humbling Pandemic: What has it taught you?
What started off as a frivolous expression of solidarity with those who went hungry during the pandemic, my hacking with fasting (by the way, #zeroFoodIsGenius) and approach to food has turned out to quite empowering and enlightening.
As Amura's Saravanan said it very aptly, "The less food, the better" is gold. My addendum would be: "The less sugar, the better!"
The Science of Fasting
What has science got to do with an Indian tradition, you ask. Well, some Japanese scholar has recently won a Nobel prize for his work on Autophagy (another fancy name for fasting). Also, made me wonder: How many more such endorsements of past Indian traditional practice will it take for us Indians to appreciate the wisdom behind so many of our age old traditions?
The Science of Focus
I have purchased and partially consumed Calport's three books including Digital Minimalism. It is primarily about our inability to stay focused thanks to the addictive algorithms deviously designed by the F-MAGA companies that are eating the world. The ability to deeply focus requires you to start with a 30-day digital fast as well. A "Life of Focus" is also a program I enrolled in, and yet to digest all the material, let alone put it into practice.
This has been afflicting our youth for quite some time. Bart Preecs lamented the "Death of Imagination" almost twenty years ago in 2001 itself.
The Science of Fate
When Sadhguru says, "Don't look down upon anyone. Don't look up to anyone", I did not fully subscribe to it fully. After all, how can you not look at Elon Musk's brilliant entrepreneurial efforts and feel slightly inadequate? But after reading The book by Hannah Critchlow "The Science of Fate", I think he is bang on the money, like he is all the time.
The book and the material presented is something that is worth your time. After pursuring just the first chapter, I realized the importance of Yoga and how that is the best way to put distance between you and your fate - the physiology and the genetic inheritance - that you are born with and destined to. Practice yoga regularly shall allow you to lead a life driven by free will and not fate.
It behooves us to remind ourselves of the Persian Poet, Khalil Gibran in the The Prophet :
Your children are not your children, They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you Yet they belong not to you
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.
The Science of Fasting, Focus and Fate are my three biggest takeaways from the Pandemic. For once, I have not "let a good crisis go to waste". And here's the kicker: they also happen to magically align up with Saint Vallalaar's brilliant three word mantra from the 1800s, which goes as follows:
"பசித்திரு, தனித்திரு, விழித்திரு!"
As Alan Moore said, "There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence."
Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.
Finally, it seems appropriate to remind ourselves of Nikola Tesla's quote, for whatever it is worth!
