Imagine! Jay is a senior executive in a multinational corporate. He wakes up each day to a busy work day made busier by the pandemic.

The first thought that comes to him when he wakes up this Wednesday at 6 am is the 8:30 a.m. meeting for which he needs to be in the right frame of mind to make his arguments convincing.

That dreaded meeting is better than expected. He heaves a sigh of relief that allows him to relax until lunch. However an email at 2 pm on a reported defect in a product gets him back on high alert. He calls for an urgent meeting the next day at 10 a.m. He spends the rest of the afternoon strategising on how to get the necessary people focused on resolving the issue.

When he gets to bed that night, his mind is already fixated on how he thinks the 10 a.m. meeting on Thursday should pan out. It has been a busy Wednesday. Thursday looks more of the same. He thinks he must take Friday off to spend time with his daughter who has school holidays this week, but an important budget meeting scheduled for Friday puts paid to his plans. He fears if he is not present for the Friday meeting, everything he has worked for till now may be lost. Every email and every meeting seems more important than the last unfortunately.

Imagine! Ganesan is a taxi driver. The pandemic has made life extremely difficult. Every morning he prays there should be sufficient trips to meet his rentals even after the concessions the cab company has thrown in. He has been able to barely get by the last few weeks. He has started doing longer hours and has signed up to a few different ride-hailing apps hoping to break even each day. To him, his hand to mouth existence leaves him no opportunity to think of anything outside of how he will get through the day.

What is common to Jay and Ganesan is this fear of the future. To be fair, Ganesan has no respite. If he does not turn up to work any day, he will not even have enough to put food on the table for his family. Our hearts must go out to people like Ganesan, who are really reeling under the severe economic backlash of the pandemic.

The irony is that even people like Jay, who are unlikely to be in a situation so dire, i.e. the basic necessities are all easily met, are unable to come out of this cycle of anxiety, despair and momentary relief when the seemingly dark clouds pass. There is a Jay in each one of us who is reading this post. Our fears and anxieties do not allow us to connect to the bigger purpose of our existence.

If we dont take time to cool down, if we do not stop seeing a tiger waiting to devour us in every news or email we receive, if we cannot slow down a bit without having to compromise our craft, are we not wasting our intelligence?

What good is an intelligence that struggles in a daily routine and withers away? How can we turn our attention to the bigger problems facing humanity rather than the next email or the imagined personal crisis? This is by no means belittling our daily challenges. But it has been our repeated experience that most of those tigers we saw in front of us were unfounded fears. And such imaginary tigers appear more than ever in this environment of the pandemic.

The discipline of meditation, wisdom from the great thinkers of today as well as from the past and making a habit of being of service to others are techniques to slow down and cool down. To see life from a bigger perspective!

I see a Jay in me and many around me!! But it also surprises me that many seem to carry on without stopping to think. And it genuinely concerns me that we may be hurtling individually and collectively down a roller coaster ride that has a crash landing.

Are we in times when now more than ever before, we should be making a habit of pausing to ponder? Keen to hear what you think of my musings.