After the Diwali of last year, I travelled to Dubai with my cousins.
It was a short five-day trip, with each day packed to the brim.
We started Day 1 on high note, covering several major attractions, stopping and enjoying 6-7 places, clicking pictures, and ending the day with a visit to the Burj Khalifa.
We returned to the hotel quite late, I put up a child-like drama that I did not get any picture, especially in the Dubai mall with Burj Khalifa in the background, and slept even late.
The next morning, as I was performing suptapadangushtasana, I fainted.
And I don’t remember anything that happened after that.
When I woke up, I was lying in bed, surrounded by all of them. For the record, it was my elder bro, bhabhi (his wife), their 5yo daughter and my younger bro. There was absolute memory loss of that one hour or two or whatever had transpired between my fainting and regaining senses.
These three were rightly convinced that I was unfit for travelling that day.
So they dropped me at another cousin’s home, who had coincidentally landed in Dubai the night before, with his wife and their 11yo daughter.
We all come upstairs in their home. They showed me the guest room. And I slept like a baby. This was little after the noon.
When I woke up, it was already dark. It was around 7 pm. I had an array of messages from my cousin whose home I was staying at, that the fruits are kept in fridge (my bro knows his sister well :D), and that they were at Dubai mall, and would be back in a while.
So I took a banana and a thepla with curd that my bhabhi had kept for me, and sat in the balcony of their Burj-Khalifa facing apartment. Alone.
It turns out, I have always looked for some bit of solitude in my days. It is my fuel. It is my best friend, my way of life, my oxygen.
And here I was, that the solitude walked up to me in ways I had never expected.
Sitting in that balcony I was nothing beyond joyful and peaceful. Filled with gratitude that even when I was unwell in a foreign land, I had family to drop me to another family, who made sure I was surrounded by food I love. I even enjoyed the musical fountain show of Burj Khalifa, where they played Baby Shark :))
It turns out, you always find what you are looking for, sometimes even unconsciously and unexpectedly.
I am someone who loves solitude more than anything else.
I knew for sure I was not going to find my pockets of solitude in this trip, mostly because we were going to Dubai, not an ashram. I was okay with it. But somewhere, somehow, even in the most surreal ways, solitude found me.
The way my body found it by falling ill is obviously a reaction to too much work or travel, and too little rest. And the idea is never to promote getting to this level of exhaustion.
But no matter what you do and whatever happens to you and whatever falls apart, what you are innately looking for, even when you have not asked for, is looking for you too. Make what you can, of this info.
