Buzz


[Text from my Toastmasters Speech - Delivered two months ago]

The day before yesterday, I started hearing a buzz noise in my head. Please don’t laugh! This is not a joke. The first time I noticed it, I thought this was an ambient sound in my house. It was late at night. I was about to sleep. I was hearing a slight light pitched humming sound, as if hundreds of bees were swarming and buzzing not too far from me. I switched on my bedside lamp and looked around, really! And there were no bees. I did feel stressed a bit, thinking what was happening to me? What was that noise around or in my head? It took sometime for me to calm down and fall into sleep that night.

When I woke up in another wintry and dark morning, I could still hear the buzzing noise. Before going out to my drive to work through morning rush, I checked the net and searched for the causes of having this condition and found that there are many possibilities. Some of these possibilities are very scary, like brain tumor, neurological disorder, etc., to mild ones, like wax build up in ears or ear infections. Oh my God! That was what exactly I said to myself. There I was, in my prime, planning for all kinds of career moves ahead of time, devising software development and stocks investing strategies using various underlying technologies, wanting to relearn piano and keyboard, yearning to visit the beautiful Kawai, the second Hawaii island I could not visit in last year’s Mawii vacation, and planning for extending my family.

Somewhere I heard once that man dreams and God laughs. All my meticulous planning, scheduling, budgeting, devising looked meaningless at that point in the morning as I was driving through the regular heavy traffic in Deerfoot Trail South. All the political and the entertainment news flashing through my iPhone apps seemed like pointless. I thought, this is it then. I never thought I was immortal, but never accepted that the end can be so early and so horridly possible.

Dear Toastmasters. You may think that I am overreacting. I say, yes I am. I am overreacting to the remotest possibility of dying. I am overreacting to an unpleasant outcome, and unknown afterwards. Will there be a heaven or a hell? Will there be a benevolent and all loving God, waiting for me after the spiraling and the lightened tunnel or will there be an incomprehensible non existence? What will happen to my loved ones? Will the insurance and banks give hard time to them after I am gone? How would my loving family feel? These and many other questions ran through my mind in that otherwise monotonous drive to work that morning.

I made an appointment to see my very busy doctor in later part of today, and hope to know what is the cause of this buzzing sound. Maybe, it will be nothing serious. Or, perhaps it will be something drastic and heartbreaking. I don’t know yet. But this is what I know, these invisible bees, the buzzing have changed something in me that is making me look at my known world in a different light already. It has raised the questions of what is important in life, and what is not. It has started making these precious moments that I take for so granted, as real precious, and not so infinite.


[Note: Later it was found that the stubborn wax in ears was acting as the sound of "bees".]


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