A more current update coming soon (for now, we are grateful to share that through various intensities, Viral is doing well and is relatively stable considering this fundamentally de-stabilizing stage of the process). In the meantime this flashback from Day Zero, and a photo from Mother’s Day.
The phone rang a little past 2AM. It’s Viral on the other end. “I’m fine,” he says, his voice calm and clear. “But I had a small accident. I got dizzy in the bathroom, and somehow hit my head and bruised my arm. They are going to do a CT scan.” Nipun, Guri and I head straight for the hospital. With his low platelet counts any impact to the head could be extremely dangerous, and his transplant is less than twelve hours away. The night nurses are as puzzled as Viral is about what had happened. He’d shown no prior signs of dizziness and had no clear memory of stumbling. The bumps on the side of his head are not small ones. We ice them and wait for the scan.
“Uncertainty is a feature of life, not a bug.” Over the weekend I’d come across notes from a long ago meeting in which Viral had shared that line. Over the course of the day I ask him to unpack it from this moment in time. Here’s what he had to say:
“Uncertainty is a fundamental quality of reality. It’s inherent in the emerging truth of how things unfold. But we are pattern seeking creatures. This makes it hard for us to stay with uncertainty. We try to create stability and predictability through our mental models, and this is a very adaptive thing, but it is also limiting because whatever mental model we have creates, some amount of confirmation bias, and some amount of inattentional blindness. When we encounter the newness of a moment we tend to filter it through interpretation. Interpretation is based on a pattern, and patterns are based in the past. But if you find a way to stay with uncertainty then you are essentially discovering at your edge. Your past experience can become a gateway, instead of a boundary. Past experience is not a bad thing, it’s just that if we are not present to the “past” aspect of the past, then instead of it being a tool it becomes a limitation, because we are going to parse everything through it rather than leveraging it for actually learning in the aliveness and possibility of the present moment. Staying with uncertainty actually generates a contact with aliveness, because it’s the nature of life. It becomes a feature when you can actually meet it with a sense of creative possibility and potentiation.
I don’t want to romanticize it, but I think some of this stuff is just about the power of compounding interest (pun intended :)) at this intersection. If you get curious about that place where your attention meets the unknown you start to build a muscle for discovery. And over time this becomes much more attractive and nourishing than being swept away by an unconscious pattern. Often that is what fear is– a strong, unconscious pattern. So for instance with the CT scan — “Oh my God, what could it be?” My mind doesn’t go there and I think that’s the result of a different kind of pattern. A pattern of unpatterning in a way.
I am flooded with the textures and nuances of the present moment. What does it feel like to be wheeled in a high-tech bed through the corridors of a sparkling hospital in my Darth Vader HEPA mask, to receive the concerned looks from the care team around me who’d seen me completely stable just hours before, to notice the precise skill of the transport technician who gracefully maneuvers the bulky contraption of the bed, and the IV pole through narrow openings, to dialog with the CT technician about the transformations he’s experienced in his field…. Partly what I am describing here are just the remnants of the experience. Experience itself is tangible and grounded in a profusion of sensations. Registering these moments and more are what my own mind moved towards within this particular experience. It had that availability. The availability to move beyond certain kinds of patterns and attune to more of the many other possibilities that always lay dormant in each moment. I’m grateful for this capacity whenever it arises. If my mind was fixated on a pattern — then I’d be interested in exploring what that state has to reveal. The broader point is having the availability to be present to, interested in, and nonjudgemental about any of my experience.“
***
A few hours later the scans come back:
All clear. Onward to what(ever) comes next.
The Poetry Of 