An Important Life Lesson I Got From My COVID-19 Experience

My Post-Virus Thought Process.

I was taking a shower last week (I take two every day) when I started to notice that there something very weird going on. I couldn’t figure it out then, but I soon did.

I lost my goddamn sense of smell. I couldn’t smell anything. I couldn’t smell the soap, and that was why my supposedly relaxing shower felt ..um.. incomplete.

I kind of got to terms with what this meant. I got myself tested, and the report stated the obvious — I caught the V (or the V caught me). I lost my taste soon after that — the only thing my tongue could do for me was to tell whether my food was hot or cold.

I was room quarantined (I still am, at the time of writing), so I have a lot of time to myself for thinking. That’s when it hit me. I’m missing an entire array of sustenance pleasure because my body isn’t capable of it.

What if we treated life like food…or perfume?

Taste is material. It is controlled by a very real, physical part in our body — the tongue, or the taste buds, to be precise. Odor is material. We can smell because we have functioning organs called noses (I can’t speak for myself here). Our sense of touch is material. So is hearing. Our skin and ears take care of each. Let’s take a look at our lives now.

Is life material? Do we have rules on how to live life? Can we quantify life?

Life, is in no way quantifiable (years spent on earth don’t count as a quantity). The way I see life is not the way you see it. There’s no benchmark for us to decide whether a person is living a good life. Sure, people always compare success and happiness to the amount of wealth they possess, but there too, wealth is subjective. Wealth can mean different things to different people. It can mean something that is most important to them, like voice to a singer or fitness to an athlete. Or it can mean what they cherish the most — like relationships, memories or time spent with their pet.

Life is what we perceive of it. Life is what we make of it. A lot of times, people feel stuck in their lives. Be it in their career, in their relationship, or just their journey of life as a whole.

I know you’ve already heard that you’re in charge of life and only you can decide where it goes and how it goes, but I guess you’ve heard it so many times because it is true. While being in charge of your own life seems too much of a responsibility, isn’t it the best thing ever? If you think about it, the same earth, the same 24 hours, is viewed in 7 billion different ways, colors and shades. Life is awesome because it is a collection of mere thoughts. Life isn’t all about things, it is about what we think and feel about things. Isn’t it beautiful that 7 billion different perceptions of life intertwine and co-exist?

The point is, when you feel stuck in life and feel like there’s nothing left for you to do to wiggle out of the situation, think of yourself as having lost your sense of smell. Or taste. You do not know that jam tastes sweet, because you don’t know that there’s something called taste.

While getting your taste back is a material fix, fixing your life is more of a thought process. Maybe you really aren’t stuck. Maybe you just feel stuck. Probably, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. You may feel that your 9–5 is sucking the life out of you, but the actual problem here is not your job. I is your not knowing what you want to do, if not your job. If you figure out what you want to do, your focus is now on setting up your passion. You’re not stuck anymore — but what has changed? Just your thoughts.

I’m trying to draw a very abstract connection between feeling hopeless and finding a ray of hope. If you tell me that you’ve tried everything to get your life on track and still failed, I’ll totally believe you. You’ve tried everything that you can think of — but there are so many lines of thinking, have you tried all of them? “If it wasn’t for this, I would’ve…”, “If this person was not in my life, I will…”, “If I can do this for 3 weeks, then…” — there are n-3 more options left.

One simple way to remain hopeful and excited about life is to simply be proud of yourself. Be proud of what you are, what you’ve done till now, the mistakes you’ve learnt from, and every path you’ve taken to reach where you are now. Celebrate what you like. Your likes and dislikes are your own. Don’t let anyone else push you into believing otherwise. That defines you. If you don’t like this definition, you can always change it — remember being in charge of your life?

There’s an interesting adage called the Murphy’s law, which in its true form reads something like “If something can go wrong, it will”. I recently read a very interesting variant of Murphy’s law, which goes like “Smile. Tomorrow will be worse.” While this may seem utterly pessimistic, it kind of pushes you to be the best version of yourself today — to make most out of the only thing you have control over — The phenomenon of Now.

I didn’t think of all this over one whiff of soap. This is an idea that I’ve flirted with for quite some time now, ever since I saw a meme that read “We can see colors because we have cells called cones in our eyes. What if we’re missing an entire aspect of the universe just because we are unable to perceive it?” Pretty deep for a meme, I know.

So tell me, the next time you feel uncertain or stuck, are you going to give up, or are you gonna lose your goddamn sense of smell?

Thanks for reading, feel free to comment if you agree or disagree with my thoughts. Until next time, stay safe and wear a mask — else you’ll be spreading the wrong kind of positivity.