You never know what is going to happen in life, therefore, the only logical decision is to keep your heart open and just enjoy the ride, letting go of the ego centered I which wants to control every outcome.
Yesterday, after a long day at the clinic, I thought I would just tweak the setting on my new laptop to optimize its performance. It wasn’t really necessary, but you know, these little toys are so fun to play with. For you geeks out there, it’s a Dell Inspiron with Vista. Before I knew it, I had somehow disconnected the touch pad, and could no longer use the touch pad to click on anything. I couldn’t even turn off the computer.
So I went to the desktop in my other room and Googled “Dell technical support”. The results which came up were not encouraging – the second entry had expletives prominently displayed in the title.
Nonetheless, I gamely found the 800 number and told I it might be a ten minute wait. (I’m skipping about 30 minutes of suffering drama involving me trying to fix the #%@! thing on my own.)
Then comes the voice on the other line….obviously Asian, I think Indian. He talks a little fast and his accent is a bit thick, but I try to be polite, remembering that it is only through his kindness that I am going to be able to go home and sleep with the knowledge that I don’t have to face this problem monster in the morning.
He gives me instructions so that he can get access to my machine remotely (from India!…isn’t modern technology somewhat amazing!). We chat amiably between the pauses. At one point, I see that I am e-chatting with “Pranav”, and I jot down his badge number for no particular reason.
I tell him I have been to India. He says, “oh”. I say, Himachal Pradesh (an area about the size of the state of Washington). He says “I’m from there”. “I was in Dharamsala for quite some time”, I say. “Oh, I’m from there.”
I say I used to be good friends with several young men who ran a cyber cafe in McLeod Ganj…I even remember one of their names: Rajeesh. He immediately comes back with, “oh, that’s Awasthi Cyber Cafe, my cousin Atul works there.” I immediately remember Atul, a young man with an ever smiling face. Pranav and I are chatting like new friends now in between repairing what seems a somewhat scarey error I somehow made with my unsuspecting finger tips.
Finally, the laptop is fully functional again, and Pranav puts the hard sell on me to upgrade my warranty which expires in 10 months. I’ve been in the clinic for 13 hours at this point, on a day which started with a two plus hour session with my accountant crunching numbers. I thank Pranav profusely for his help, but tell him I need to go home and sleep, ask him for his direct line, and tell him that he can call later if he wants to check in.
Riding on the light rail back to downtown, a particularly friendly young man spontaneously starts to chat. He turns out to be an IT consultant. He tells me not to bother getting the warranty as it’s not worth the eventual cost should I ever need to replace the laptop. I give him a card and let him know I can help his shoulder, neck, and back pain with acupuncture (don’t all computer users have some of that). I ask him for his card but he doesn’t have one on him, says he will have to stop by.
Somewhere in my little psycho-drama, I remember the Tibetan story about a young boy who falls off his horse and breaks his arm. Everybody laments his bad fortune, but his grandfather says “Maybe bad, maybe good…we’ll see.” A day later, the Chinese army comes through his village and conscripts every able bodied young man to join the army…and leaves the boy with the broken arm with his family.
So it goes in life, we never know what is going to happen. Better just to keep your heart open, let go of the self-centered story lines, and focus on peaceful interactions with others, thinking how to benefit them, how to make their minds be at ease. At the end of our life, this will probably help our mind be at ease.