This too shall pass……

It was a routine day at home. I blissfully shuttled between my responsibility as a mother of a joyful child and making reports of my cases pertaining counselling & consultations. My kid furious at the monthly unit tests denied learning the antonyms in English and Vilom Shabd in Hindi. Hence, I thought to explain her with my professional logic. Maybe today we do not understand the deeper meanings behind our subjects, but they symbolise the existential truth of life. Be it geography that many find boring. But I always imagined the valleys, the prairies, the rivers, and the twists and turns and the merging into the oceans as life cycles. 

So our curriculum touches upon secretly the essence of our existence on this planet. She heard me candidly trying to find some meaning to what I was telling to her.

I believe, these antonyms are essentially teaching us the most important phases of our entity. The entire universe is based on duality. Each birthmark, our death, every dawn is followed by dusk, a vibrant sun has its crescent moon. Every grin has a sadness to it, each moment is just a temporary phase-overlapping and reversing it. While she agrees to my logic and starts learning, I have questions brewing up on my screen from my patients’.

2021 has been a strange year. So far, none of us ever witnessed a national crisis or a humanitarian disaster of this gravity that hit us in the name of a devastating Coronavirus. The Facebook perfect lives suddenly slipped into a shock enough to alter the life goals, aspirations, and dreams. It is natural to feel depressed, distressed and slip into disbelief and accept the tragic reality that Covid is now not just a number but sadly the name of our loved ones. Along with the patient, the families too go through similar pain, uncertainty, and the rude fluke of destiny. These terrible shocks and the challenges thereafter are enough to hibernate from the spunky social lives and go into utmost grief.

While I just sorted out the dilemma of my kid, tough questions were being asked to me from families of Covid positive families. How do I respond positively when I hear from them, ‘Our best period was going on, we were the happiest people-settled well and breathing abundance. There are so many unaccomplished life plans, everything was so picture perfect! The medical reports have shaken us to the core; ‘Why Us?’ How did this happen to us”. Where did we go wrong?

Even as life coaches many times, we take time to help people get real answers to genuinely difficult questions. How does one motivate them to lift their spirits and gear to get out of the mess that Covid is creating at home? 

While I search for the answers, I am reminded of a beautiful story that once my spiritual guru (who remains away from the limelight) had recited to me. Today I would like to share with my readers what he taught me years ago when I started my spiritual quest and made me a much more sorted individual. With deep reverence to my mentor, here’s how to take into stride something as fatal as Covid.

It is a true story. A long time ago, there was a king in China having a flourishing kingdom. Life had bestowed him with the best that anybody could ever have. One day he was attacked and he lost his kingdom, his military. He ran for his life as the enemy horses were brutally following him with swords. Death was inevitable.

 As a last resort, he saw a small den in a cliff and hid inside. While his heart was pounding hard, his blood rushed into his brain. While gasping for his concluding breaths’, suddenly, he remembered a saint had given him a talisman once and told him to read whenever he would either think ‘my time is up’ or be in the ‘most blissful phase’ of the materialistic world. 

Fear of death relentlessly mounting, he opened the talisman. It read “THIS TOO WILL PASS”. Meanwhile, his ears heard the armed men approaching close along with the neighing of the furious horses. He finally gave up and closed his eyes to surrender to his death. To his astonishment, they passed over unable to see him. He couldn’t believe being alive. Thereafter he never looked back, the lesson of the talisman was engraved in his memory, and in a few years, he regained the lost power and fought back with his newly build army to take over his lost kingdom. 

Post this incident he was a new soul. On his throne he engraved in gold “THIS TOO WILL PASS” and he read it daily to keep reminding himself that whatever the life phase -power, fame, money, empire, ill health, loss, poverty, anything in this world or whatever state one is in today, always keep rhyming :

“THIS TOO WILL PASS”. NOTHING IS PERMANENT. NEITHER HAPPINESS NOR GRIEF. So next time when you fail to find the answers to Covid challenges, say it loud and clear: THIS TOO WILL PASS”.

And today a simple grammar lesson of a 4th std. the child gave me the answers that I need to write to the numerous families who contact me with the utmost faith and integrity that may be God does some miracles through me. I am going to say them to all :

“THIS

 TOO 

WILL

Written by Meenu Chopra