Check that Need

 

(old article written 7 years ago and guess what Im still running around! Photo from http://zenchick.com)

Last Sunday, I slowed down.

I mean, seriously:  I was fed up with running around, beating deadlines, meeting schedules, pleasing other people and doing my duties like a perfect person – I went on a small discrete personal strike and took a cruise down the highway with my speedometer set at 20 kmph.

Now finally I can in fact recommend everyone to try this once at least ... It changes perception, it puts things in proportion, and it totally surprises. Its almost as funny as being able to put the rest of the world in fast forward and sitting back watching their curious antics with total detachment.

Well, this is how it felt.

The rest of the country seems to be obsessed with speed. Sonic wooshes as cars, lorries and bikes overtook on a race somewhere where good things were happening, where regular mortals did not want to be left out. (And since this was Sunday morning it could not be the office crowd or the Sunday evening crowd returning from their families outstationed…) so there was I sitting day dreaming about life and time and the need for speed…

Ever noticed how rushed people are today ? Stop, slow down a minute and look around . From around day break when the school vans wake non school going people rudely with their raucous honking, to the daily rushes at banks for example and finally the evening daily office returning crush; are all these desperate house husbands really speeding and cussing and ploughing their way HOME? You wonder- are there so many dedicated family men on the roads at 5 30 pm or is it something else Im missing? Are these guys ALL running home to help the wife with dinner or take over the toddlers so that Missis can put her feet up and  take a break?? wow!!Im impressed !…

 People are so obsessed with getting to the head of the queue or winning this race, the man in front of you moves half a step and the man behind you is practically panting down your neck to urge you on. And trust me  the "ladies" in ATM queues are worse, they actually poke you with the edges of their check books or umbrellas or sharp things which you don't dare turn around to face…

The amazing thing about this modern rush is that it happens in a time when science has fine tuned time saving devices to next to absolute perfection. Civilization never took less time than this to , for example, get you your so called "daily bread" and no, lets be honest, its not the price of that bread which is keeping our noses to the grindstone.

Coffee machines make your beverage in two minutes, rice cookers, pressure cookers and washing machines finish your work for you unsupervised and grinding grain and curry powders is the work of minutes, and the ubiquitous computer spews out spreadsheets and reports that would have taken months in a matter of seconds. Isn't it wonderful. Just one question-  where did all that saved time go? You would think it meant that we can  practice a minute or two  of patient

​Tai Chi

 , when we are in hospital cashiers queue, instead of scuffing the heels of the person in front?

The cost of living is high but then that's not what kills us, its this need for speed, because we don't eat properly, take walks or exercise and we don't talk to our parents or children any more,let alone having a meaningful conversation with someone who may actually need us, or time for a pet.

 Before you know it you are hit by diabetes, cholestrol and thickened arteries not to mention a whole horde of mental hang ups caused by the sheer stress of the race- and this too in a time where things have never been quicker ,easier and smoother than right now.

There was admittedly a time when people got around by bullock carts and elephants which mean maximum speed was about 20 kmph. A time when you did your own laundry near some well, with the birds singing around nearby and took time off to grow your own vegetables and cook them slowly over wood fires. And there weren't these wonderful ATM machines which saved your time, or the Internet over which you could manage your finances without having to step out onto the street in the first place.

Did all of that give us more quality family time? And if not, what happened?

Return to Nirvana

I must say I have lost the ability to work well under pressure. Frankly I just crack up and start screaming and keening pathetically. Its a drag on my family the two or three individuals that I do have left. It makes me wonder what happened to the quiet laid back person I was. I was happy at one time. 

In a way maybe that is part of how the world runs, you cant always be in one state. No there are many states you are in and you will be in. You may seem like the same image on the surface of it but underneath you may seethe and writhe and struggle like a fish in a drying pond. Thats part of what this cosmos seems to be about, us feeling and us reacting. We have been given sensory organs to feel. Living would not be the same if we didnt have eyes, ears, skin, tastebuds, the sense of smell and a mind which grasps all the stimuli we throw at it. But then you wonder if living is all it has been made out to be. Maybe there is an existence which is more satisfactory than this living which is being battered and blown about by this organic organism we are tied to on this Earth. Not another planet but another plane, where things are always Om and that is never boring...
​

The Poor the Old and the Ugly

     

(these photos are merely representative, but closely representative actually)
​

So last MOnday I struggled to my halfway halt and had to embark a bus at about 7pm to get home. It was the wrong bus and would only get me half way there but it was late so I was desperate. I sat next to a dear elderly lady of, perhaps late sixties. In a while she told me worriedly that she was taking medications which made her sleepy and to please wake her if we came to the Galagedera bus halt. She pulled out a left leg, which looked like it was from a horror movie about leprosy and filaria combined and elaborated that she had these sores which had worsened over the years and there was a "germ in her body" for which she was taking medications for a long time. She described in some detail the appearance of the kind of pastules that she had had to suffer on her lower body, saying they looked like the "naval" in Kawum. I frankly did not want to know any of this and sat quite still. Then she started coughing, and with the bus starting up, I realised that each cough was coming my way with the wind from the window. She told me sadly that the medications she had been taking for months did not seem to be working. She had t o travel anyway, because she was a poor woman, and she sold fruits at some market place, so as to earn some money for the food. the bags of fruits left behind from Mondays sales, were collected around her oozing feet. 

Ok what would you have done?

personally I froze in a rictus of (hopefully irrational?) terror, tried not to breath much, but told her I would tell her the halt, and also continued to discuss her problem with her. Because you know, this could be you or me, too, except that we temporarily feel privileged and feel it wont happen to us. If you look at the statistics, it can happen to anyone.

Im a Buddhist. Buddhism works in the face of festering diseases, leprosy, filaria, AIDS, suffering starvation and old age. Because all that stuff about a powerful God who made a pretty world, tends to fall apart when you look at people like this. Is it because they prayed to the wrong God? Do you seriously mean to tell me there are no Christians or Muslims praying properly to the right God who do not have diseases and who do not face old age and feebleness?

Anyway here she was and there I was.

and the statistics are that one in every four people in Sri Lanka will be old, by 2040. 

Being old, if we go on neglecting our health, and not making plans for our future,

​our old age statistically speaking mostly ​

involves illness, feebleness, and often even NCDs such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and its complications, and worse, upto even paralysis.

​ ​ Poverty added to this, as well as an administrative structure which does not help the elderly at all is just about right to make such a future well nigh intolerable.

​

 

And Im ashamed to say that before she got down at Galagedera I got up and walked to the front of the bus, without helping her.

Because I didnt actually want her to brush too closely against me as she got down, and I didnt want to touch her bags, and I wanted nothing to do with her. 

Im sorry, but seriously I have enough problems of my own at the moment and I didnt need more, and I did not need to worry about having more.

Im average, that way. 

​Are you a better person?​

The Poor the Old and the Ugly

     

(these photos are merely representative, but closely representative actually)
​

So last MOnday I struggled to my halfway halt and had to embark a bus at about 7pm to get home. It was the wrong bus and would only get me half way there but it was late so I was desperate. I sat next to a dear elderly lady of, perhaps late sixties. In a while she told me worriedly that she was taking medications which made her sleepy and to please wake her if we came to the Galagedera bus halt. She pulled out a left leg, which looked like it was from a horror movie about leprosy and filaria combined and elaborated that she had these sores which had worsened over the years and there was a "germ in her body" for which she was taking medications for a long time. She described in some detail the appearance of the kind of pastules that she had had to suffer on her lower body, saying they looked like the "naval" in Kawum. I frankly did not want to know any of this and sat quite still. Then she started coughing, and with the bus starting up, I realised that each cough was coming my way with the wind from the window. She told me sadly that the medications she had been taking for months did not seem to be working. She had t o travel anyway, because she was a poor woman, and she sold fruits at some market place, so as to earn some money for the food. the bags of fruits left behind from Mondays sales, were collected around her oozing feet. 

Ok what would you have done?

personally I froze in a rictus of (hopefully irrational?) terror, tried not to breath much, but told her I would tell her the halt, and also continued to discuss her problem with her. Because you know, this could be you or me, too, except that we temporarily feel privileged and feel it wont happen to us. If you look at the statistics, it can happen to anyone.

Im a Buddhist. Buddhism works in the face of festering diseases, leprosy, filaria, AIDS, suffering starvation and old age. Because all that stuff about a powerful God who made a pretty world, tends to fall apart when you look at people like this. Is it because they prayed to the wrong God? Do you seriously mean to tell me there are no Christians or Muslims praying properly to the right God who do not have diseases and who do not face old age and feebleness?

Anyway here she was and there I was.

and the statistics are that one in every four people in Sri Lanka will be old, by 2040. 

Being old, if we go on neglecting our health, and not making plans for our future, involves illness, feebleness, and often even NCDs such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and its complications, and worse, upto even paralysis. 

And Im ashamed to say that before she got down at Galagedera I got up and walked to the front of the bus, without helping her.

Because I didnt actually want her to brush too closely against me as she got down, and I didnt want to touch her bags, and I wanted nothing to do with her. Im sorry, but seriously I have enough problems of my own at the moment and I didnt need more, and I did not need to worry about having more.

Im average, that way.