I did not want to let go of the river they call the womb of civilization. She had allowed me to feel her pulse that day. My palm followed the subtle indent my fingers created on the filmy surface and disappeared into the murkiness. My arm tensed as I tried to hold back the flow. The river responded by manufacturing ripples, amplifying the gurgle by a fraction of an octave. The slippery wetness grazed my forearm as my feet held onto the riverbank. Moments prior, the grand finale of a daily ritual on the banks of the Ganges, a sacred river for millions of Hindus, had ended. Thousands were thronging the steps around priests standing on tall pedestals rising from the river’s depths. The priests hoisted multi-tiered brass oil lamps, which they waved back and forth in big semi-circles every evening at sunset. I watched from the darkness of the opposite bank as they set their lamps down. Loudspeakers in the distance stopped broadcasting the low-pitched rhythmic thumping of drums and an assortment of musical instruments that accompanied a soulful rendition of the ‘aarti’ (ceremony in which lamps are lit and offered to the gods) song by a male singer. The river’s murmuring got louder as a few vagrant waves emanating from the wake left by a riverboat disappeared into a sandbank. The pulse of nature, as revealed through the river’s flow, remains fresh in my mind, as fresh as a dew drop that appears out of nowhere, waiting for the sun to wake up at dawn.

The “pulse of life” I’m trained to pick up on the wrists of my patients took on a new meaning. Placing three fingers and feeling for pulsations next to the bone framing the outer border of the wrist is a defining moment in every doctor-patient encounter, one of trust and openness. Two humans connect, one promising to help the other recover and recuperate from sickness. The heart whispers through every heartbeat, felt as a soft transient bump that pushes against the wrist as the radial artery surfaces from the depths of the forearm before disappearing into the hand, creating a network of little blood vessels resembling a palm frond. Every pulsation offers telltale signs of the heart’s health. Fast or slow, irregular or regular, feeble or brisk, soft or bounding, point to signs of health or sickness that inform a doctor’s decisions. The river of life humans carry within themselves cannot stop flowing. Like the daily flow of millions of gallons of water bathing the fertile plains stretching for miles from the riverbank, thousands of gallons of blood spurt out of the heart daily to feed the hunger of every cell under the skin. Blood flows through our bodies at 2-3 miles/hour, matching that of a river in its lower reaches before it merges into the sea. 

We also feel life’s pulsation in the mind through every thought. The river of thoughts is unpredictable. The bed of the mind’s river can be dry one moment, and the next moment it can flood. Passions heave waves high enough to drown reason. Sorrow snakes through a canopy of self-doubt and despair in never-ending loops. Drops of happiness may drizzle or turn into a deluge. Hope and inspiration seep in like chords of light filtering to the forest floor through the dense shade above. Underlying all these various faces of the mind is the current of life. We can feel that current when we watch the mind—its moods and shades, its dark and light side—as if we are sitting on a riverbank. As concentration dips its ‘hand’ into the mind’s flow and awareness scans the mind’s expanse, everything slows, connecting us with life flowing through nature and our bodies. The synchronized dance of the mind and the body churn the depths of our unconscious, revealing the happiness-laden depths beneath old decaying thoughts to which we cling.