Rise of the Isolated Phoenix

Photo by Faiza Taqi Hassan
The only thing that is certain today is uncertainty. I am fully aware it’s an oxymoron, but this statement has never rung truer. Life was all about planning. What’s your five-year plan? How do you see yourself in the future? What do you want to be when you grow up? Then we got knocked down by an avalanche so huge, that we didn’t know what hit us. Needless to say, we were completely unprepared. And just like that, life came to a standstill. Things froze in time. Everything we had thought about, planned for and wanted to happen, came to a halt. It’s as if God had pressed the breaks and said, STOP.
I had heard someone recently call this moment in time, The Great Pause. And this is how I like to think of it. I, like many others went through the same emotions. It was the sudden shock, followed by anxiety, an extreme sense of worry coupled with an awful fear of immanent death and destruction. How are we going to do this? What is really going to happen? Is everyone I love going to be okay? I know I should be grateful, but I really don’t want to be here, was another thought that kept echoing.
I had finally hit my rock bottom, but you know how the cliché goes, the only way from the bottom is back up. Then one fine day it hit me, we are really not the ones in control. I know we believe that, as our faith tells us to. But here was the actual proof, staring all of us in the face. Therefore, either you go against the tide, which we all know is impossible. Or we do something else, something absolutely absurd but completely freeing at the same time. We just embrace what is, and surrender.
This virus personally, has brought me face to face with my demons. The very things I was running away from, were the things that I had to deal with. It wasn’t fair, I thought. Why me, was another question I kept asking. But then, I put down my arms and stopped fighting. And that is when things finally started to make sense to me. If we need to grow to the fullness of our potential, we need to sit with the uncomfortable. We need to see what is, as opposed to a notion of how we think things should be.
Photo by Faiza Taqi Hassan
