Spirit Silently Speaks

A meditation on crisis, the natural desire to protect our loved ones, and the peace that surpasses all understanding

“Thank you for this wonderful piece, Shiv. So much resonates, particularly this: "Detachment to me does not mean 'I don't care'. It means 'I care so much that I don't mind what happens.'"

But as a fellow dad, there's a question I have around this. I've ridden on the ambulance at one point or another with both of my children (who came through these situations, thankfully, fine). On those rides, though, my deep attachment to them drove me to be extremely attached to the outcome of them being okay, for them to survive the current crisis.

Part of my attachment as a dad means, of course, wanting my kids to be okay, to feel safe, and to outlive me—I hope by many years. When that outcome seems threatened in a moment of crisis, or even outside of crisis, more generally, I could never claim not to mind what happens re. their safety and survival. My attachment to them means that I mind very, very much.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you!”

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Nearly 20 years ago, my extended family gathered in Northern California to celebrate my grandmother’s 75th birthday. I flew down from Toronto for the celebrations but had to return soon after the festivities ended in order to attend a job interview. The rest of the family took an overnight trip to Yosemite National Park, one of my grandmother’s bucket-list places to visit. After a wonderful trip, my family, driving in two vans, made their way back to the Bay Area where my grandmother, my aunt (my mother’s older sister) and my two elder cousins lived.

These four individuals were my second family. I had lived with them in South India during my high school years and, in some ways, they were closer to me than my own family was. I thought of my cousins as my own brothers, I could confide in my aunt more than I could in my own mother, and my grandmother, the matron of the family, was the “father figure” in my life while I lived away from my own parents.

The first of the two vans, that made their way back through the serpentine two-lane mountainous highways, contained my cousin (the younger) as driver, with my aunt in the passenger seat, my grandmother and my own younger sister seated in the back. The van that followed had my mother, her brother and his wife and three children.

Both vehicles were driving within the speed limit when a pickup truck, driven by a drunk driver, came barreling around a blind curve at over 100 miles/hr on the wrong side of the road. My cousin, who was the driver of the lead car, barely had a chance to react before he collided with the pickup head on at a combined speed of over 150 miles/hr.

The resulting impact was so great it killed my cousin and my grandmother instantly, while my aunt died of her injuries within thirty minutes. The driver of the pickup was killed on impact as well, and the truck burst into flames setting the mountainside ablaze. The highway at the accident site near the town of Modesto was shut down for hours while several fire trucks attempted to put out the fire on the mountain and numerous police cruisers and ambulances arrived at the scene.

The occupants of the second van, which contained my mother, her brother (a cardiac surgeon) and his family, were unhurt as they had been following at a considerable distance. While reeling from the shock of the carnage, their immediate focus became the one surviving member of the car crash: my sister, then 19, who had been seated in the back with my grandmother. The force of the impact had been so severe that the seatbelt (which saved her life) had cut through her. The lower strap had torn through her abdomen causing severe internal injuries and had ravaged her bowels. While the upper diagonal strap had broken through her rib cage and transected her aorta - the main artery from the heart. Despite her injuries she was still conscious. She was airlifted and spent the next two months in the ICU fighting for her life.

The doctors gave her a 2% chance of survival mainly because of the aortic transection that they did not believe could be operated on given her severely traumatized condition and internal injuries. Instead, they opted for a wait and watch approach. The family set up a base in Sacramento near the hospital she was admitted to. I flew in immediately upon hearing the news.

My mother and I went to the hospital daily first thing in the morning and sat in the waiting room until visitation hours ended at night. We were permitted to visit my sister briefly once or twice a day - but she was often unconscious or in a deep morphine haze when conscious.

I remember those days well. Not so much because of the events that had transpired (those are mostly hazy for me now) but because of what I felt. Beneath the chaos of emotions, the deep and relentless grief I felt at the passing of three loved ones, the familial interactions that ranged from light and jovial at times to dark and miserable at others and the generally surreal aura the whole episode had taken on - there, paradoxically, lay an underlying reservoir of deep peace, acceptance and a sense of ‘all is well’ within me.

Despite the doctors’ bleak 2% outlook on her survival outcome - nothing in my body resonated with their projections. Because each time I visited her and in those brief moments of lucidity when she and I would crack a silly joke amongst ourselves, as siblings often do, I knew intuitively and without a shred of doubt that ‘all was well’.

I come from a Hindu family and none of my family members except for my grandmother were particularly religious. However, they all prayed often and frequently for my sister’s survival. Although I was often invited to join in, I always abstained. For I knew that the prayers were not necessary. Deep within my body there was only that sense of peace - that sense of ‘all is well’ and as it should be.

It so happened that while my sister fought for her life, there was another 19-year-old Hispanic girl in that ICU who had suffered a severe head injury in a car accident. Her large Mexican family also came to the waiting room everyday. And we became quite well-acquainted with them. One day, their whole family received news from the doctors that the girl’s condition had deteriorated. The family formed a huge prayer circle in the waiting room holding each other’s hands. I joined them in prayer for their young daughter. She passed later that evening.

My sister made a miraculous recovery. Scar tissue formed around her transected aorta fusing the two sides together. Though it would be a few years before she would recover 100%, mostly due to complications with adhesions in her bowels that had to be removed over the years, she is now nearly 40, the mother of two children and leads a life that bears no hint of the trauma her body once endured. To this day, her aorta is still held together by scar tissue. She is considered to be a medical marvel by every physician who has ever studied her case.

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The statement I made in the article Monk See, Monk Do when I said: “I care so much that I don’t mind what happens”, may seem like it advocates for a sort of nonchalance or callousness with regards to the outcomes of situations. And when we are speaking about the life-or-death outcomes for our loved ones such an attitude of nonchalance doesn’t compute with most people. As you rightly suggest, how can one “not mind” whether one’s child lives or dies? Of course one minds. One had bloody well mind unless one is a total psychopath.

Words are limited in their ability to convey nuance. And so, allow me to make an attempt at conveying that nuance, some of which I have already alluded to in the story about my sister.

“I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial... I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.”

These words of Winston Churchill’s echo exactly how I felt during those long days when my sister fought for her life. It was not the wrongness or the unfairness of the situation that occurred to me but the sheer rightness of what was transpiring.

I have come to realize that the words ‘fate’ and ‘faith’ are synonymous. For, a person who learns to love their fate is quintessentially a person of faith. This faith is not the outcome of some religious belief or spiritual dictum, but rather the result of the profound resonance one feels within one’s being - that even in the midst of the greatest catastrophe comprehensible to the human mind, the spirit within remains at peace. A peace that surpasses all understanding.

The stoic philosophical axiom of “Amor Fati” (love your fate) is often interpreted as a hyperrational approach to life, but it is actually deeply faith based. It conceals a profound yet unarticulated metaphysics - one that intuits that there is some great loving intelligence which guides the destinies of all beings. That intelligence is accessible by everyone. And the outcome, when one realizes deeply that all that happens, no matter how egregious, is ultimately an act of love - is that one learns to reciprocate that love, by loving one’s fate.

I remember gazing at the bodies of my grandmother, my aunt and my cousin in their coffins, hours before we incinerated them. I knew from the moment I set eyes on their forms that “these were not them”. They were like life-like wax figurines from Madam Tussaud’s. Nothing of the essence of who those individuals had been in their lives was present. These were just hollow shells that remained to be burned. Even amidst my grief during the wake, I knew intrinsically that their spirits had endured. In what form or realm, I did not know, but I knew it with the same certainty in my bones with which I knew my sister would recover, despite her stark prognosis.

I have experienced many such traumas in my life. I do not wish for any of them to have happened differently. Although I miss my loved ones dearly, I do not wish them returned to me. For, life in this moment feels perfect and whole just as it is. And I am as I am because of all the joys and miseries I have enjoyed and endured. The inevitability of it all is stark and unshakeable to me.

And so, when I say that “I care so much that I don’t mind what happens”, I mean my love of my fate (which results from my faith in life) introduces a deeper dimension of peace and acceptance within my life beneath that surface level survival drive to strive for certain outcomes.

‘Not minding outcomes ’ is not an immunity to suffering. Rather, it points to that profound sense of all-is-wellness that arises, even in the midst of the deepest kind of suffering.

Nearly a decade ago, when my wife and I lived in a small rural community in Northern Japan, my older daughter, then three, had a severe asthma attack in the middle of the night. Asthma runs in my family and although she had not experienced anything like it until that night, I recognized her symptoms instantly. As she asphyxiated, I jumped into action dispensing my own rescue inhaler into her gaping mouth multiple times in the hopes that even though she couldn’t breath, at least a tiny amount of the medication would enter her airways. I then threw her in the backseat and ran every red light in the deserted town to get her to the ER. She was rushed in and put on a nebulizer at once, although by the time we had arrived the rescue inhaler had had some effect and she had begun to take shallow breaths.

During this event, as my body leaped into survival mode and as I watched myself (almost like an out-of-body experience) fly through intersections at four times the speed limit, there was that same underlying reservoir of deep calm and acceptance beneath the chaos and the adrenaline. While my human self was engaged in executing everything a father must do to protect his child, some deeper aspect within me knew instinctively that all was well and as it had to be.

I did not contrive, or rationalize, or will this aspect into experience. It just was.

Nowadays, I experience that knowing even in the ordinary mundane moments of life. A year ago, I experienced a dark night of the soul, when I was laid off from my job and could not find employment for nearly a year. Having recently bought our first home in a skyrocketing real-estate market and with interest rates at historical highs, my mortgage payments were already daunting even while I did have a job. Now, with no income, having blown through our meager savings in a matter of a few months, and facing a job market which had turned completely arid - I suffered greatly for fear of what would become of my family and my children if we lost our home.

For the first six months, I lived like a spectre - in a mental fog and a psychological darkness that consumed me. Many of the articles I wrote on Substack a year ago reflect that inner turmoil. And then gradually, that deep layer of peace that had once been a consistent feature of my life, but from which I had become estranged over the last few years, returned. And even as my bank account reflected financial ruin and the pile up of late notices and overdue bills formed a small mountain on my desk, a profound calm and a pervading sense that all-was-well became the more dominant experience in my day to day.

I began to experience profound gratitude towards my circumstances, despite the hardship that faced my family. I became grateful for simple things. The fresh spring breeze when I went for my walks. The smell of dinner cooking on the stove. The awkward expression with which my dog always looked at me when I was deep in thought. The joy of sharing a bowl of popcorn with my wife. And even on the dark days of depression that still afflicted me from time to time, I felt a gratitude for whatever mysterious alchemy was at work, tearing me apart and reforming me over and over again.

Today, I find my faith restored, my love of my fate restored. I feel it palpably every day, as I go about my ordinary life.

As fathers and mothers, we should all wish that our children will outlive us. As fathers and mothers, we will all do whatever we can to ensure that outcome even at the cost of our own lives.

Yet, there is a deeper intuition within us that senses that everything moves to a different causality than we can comprehend. A singular universal alchemy of which we are all interacting ingredients. And it is in service of that process that our lives unfold, beyond the borders of our personal desires, hopes and preferences.

A great intelligence is at work. And our spirit silently speaks its language, underneath the cacophony of our minds.

I am learning to understand that language.

My written word is an attempt to translate it, so that others may hear it too.