Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

 I’ve been thinking, we all meet crisis — major or minor — the same way: self-protective, spring-loaded, already rehearsing the worst case, fighting or fleeing what is. We become ER doctors of our own lives, stiuffing cotton into the open wound, because the animal in us is certain the bleeding is the whole story.

But a small zoom-out, even mid-chaos, shows that it never was. Every actor in our lives — an event, a person — moves by their own script, not ours. And the wound itself has more than one author: it could be self-inflicted, an accident, or simply what happens when the blood was already thin. The cause may not even live at the site of the injury.

So the work isn't to attack the one big thing with an intensity the nervous system can't hold. It's to widen the frame — from the cut to the whole body, from the body to the whole lived life — until the single cause dissolves into many, and the pressure quietly goes out of it.

Yeh jo lagta hai na kisi-kisi moment mein, ki WTF, life khatam, because ek bada loss ho gaya — that feeling comes from handing all our power to one prediction: that a single event, a single person, decides the course of everything. But what decides our life is what we choose to live out of the many stories running at once. 

There is never only one story unfolding. Just a tilt of the head and — oh, yeh bhi hai.