Buzz
[Text from my Toastmasters Speech - Delivered two months ago]
The day before yesterday, I started hearing a buzz noise in my head. Please don’t laugh! This is not a joke. The first time I noticed it, I thought this was an ambient sound in my house. It was late at night. I was about to sleep. I was hearing a slight light pitched humming sound, as if hundreds of bees were swarming and buzzing not too far from me. I switched on my bedside lamp and looked around, really! And there were no bees. I did feel stressed a bit, thinking what was happening to me? What was that noise around or in my head? It took sometime for me to calm down and fall into sleep that night.
When I woke up in another wintry and dark
morning, I could still hear the buzzing noise. Before going out to my drive to work through morning rush, I
checked the net and searched for the causes of having this condition and found
that there are many possibilities. Some of these possibilities are very scary,
like brain tumor, neurological disorder, etc., to mild ones, like wax build up
in ears or ear infections. Oh my God! That was what exactly I said to myself. There
I was, in my prime, planning for all kinds of career moves ahead of time, devising
software development and stocks investing strategies using various underlying
technologies, wanting to relearn piano and keyboard, yearning to visit the
beautiful Kawai, the second Hawaii island I could not visit in last year’s
Mawii vacation, and planning for extending my family.
Somewhere I heard once that man dreams and
God laughs. All my meticulous planning, scheduling, budgeting, devising looked
meaningless at that point in the morning as I was driving through the regular
heavy traffic in Deerfoot Trail South. All the political and the entertainment
news flashing through my iPhone apps seemed like pointless. I thought, this is
it then. I never thought I was immortal, but never accepted that the end can be
so early and so horridly possible.
Dear Toastmasters. You may think that I am
overreacting. I say, yes I am. I am overreacting to the remotest possibility of
dying. I am overreacting to an unpleasant outcome, and unknown afterwards. Will
there be a heaven or a hell? Will there be a benevolent and all loving God,
waiting for me after the spiraling and the lightened tunnel or will there be an incomprehensible
non existence? What will happen to my loved ones? Will the insurance and banks
give hard time to them after I am gone? How would my loving family feel? These and many other questions ran through my mind in that
otherwise monotonous drive to work that morning.
I made an appointment to see my very busy doctor
in later part of today, and hope to know what is the cause of this buzzing
sound. Maybe, it will be nothing serious. Or, perhaps it will be something
drastic and heartbreaking. I don’t know yet. But this is what I know, these
invisible bees, the buzzing have changed something in me that is making me look
at my known world in a different light already. It has raised the questions of
what is important in life, and what is not. It has started making these
precious moments that I take for so granted, as real precious, and not so
infinite.
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