Today we all live in a state called -‘Fear’!
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
– Rabhindranath Tagore
This simple poem that we all have grown up chanting makes so much sense today. Today we live in fear, we breath in fear. Suddenly whole human civilisation woke up in fear that they might be on the brick of extinction. Life suddenly on hold, a regular planned travel or just mandate life to work and back home is suddenly most desired routine. Why a virus outbreak turned into living havoc ?
This questions underlines very inherent and important human emotion “fear’. Love, Greed, Fear, Happiness are some of the very basic emotions we all live by but fear tops it all by all means. How ? Fear feeds the gap for unknown, what hold in future is not known, what happens to us and how, where the answer are blank, ‘fear’ fills the gap by weaving story around religion or different belief system around. Around the world we all unit under different umbrella with one same cloud overlooking us is ‘Fear’. Fear of unknown. What beholds for all of us is unknown. This is one fact beyond all knowledge we have been born with. Unknown possibilities and unknown future we have to daily pave path to live, to explore and do everything in our capabilities to make meaning out of our every breath.
We are born to chase and live unknown. But, isn’t that the case always ?
We live with chance to die either by accident or by disease, or may be over exposed to modern day addictions. Why suddenly the virus makes us scared. Like the vulture senses the fear and attacks you via your fear, same is the case of our world today. Imagination of what COVID-19 could bring in that uncertainty has caused more panic. In our daily life we settle and stabilise that uncertainty behind the vanity of modern evolved species. Suddenly when there are abrupt glimpse of that uncertainty we panic. Earlier this year death of Kobe Bryant shook the world, even to people who didn’t know who and what he meant it was intrigue. Because we don’t expect / predict such unknown outcome to known people. This unpredictable circumstance feed shock. The underlaying emotion with virus COVID-19 is very much the same. Something so unknown to us that it is taking our normal human life and intelligence away and feeding to our fear of unknown and turning into shock. Before the virus turned into Pandemic , it has seeped in as catastrophe in mind.
Being aware, being cautious and taking precaution is standard operating that anyone can do today and doing that is all we must and can do to be safe. Preventive measure is be around predicted environment and take precaution and not expose ourselves to unnecessary risk via large crowd or unknown environment. But the effect beyond seen physical melt down of COVID-19 is emotional and panic that is slowly sweeping in larger populations. Family, friends, work, each WhatsApp group flooding with warning, memes to news clipping are more feeding fear than awareness.
The fine difference between knowledge and be able to use the same for your liberation is what Tagore talked about in his poem, and that is exactly what we need to bring our human race back to senses and in control. The same fear of unknown is what we see today in our world economy. Our markets & economy feeding on fear, our ability to go on about regular life is under seize. We do what we need to be safe but let’s not make our mind caught in web of fear of unknown. All that we need is knowledge and courage to fight this unknown and come out strong.
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my civilisation awake !
Stay safe and wash your hands 🙂
Happy 2020 !