The Tao of Seat 11A
Randomness, Survival, and the Mystery of Life and Death
There are events that slice through the illusion of control like a blade through silk. The Air India crash this past Friday, June 12th is one of them.
A Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, carrying 242 souls, lifted off from Ahmedabad, India, bound for London. Minutes later, the aircraft plummeted from the sky and exploded into flames.
From this inferno only one man emerged:
Vishwashkumar Ramesh. Seat 11A.
He walked from the wreckage. Limping. Dazed. The lone survivor.
Everyone else—241 lives—gone.
His brother, confused and grief-stricken, could only say: “He has no idea how he survived.”
Neither do we. And that’s precisely where the Tao enters.
The Dance of Randomness
In Tao Te Ching (Chapter 1), Lao Tzu writes:
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”
This story lives inside that unspoken Tao.
Western minds crave explanations like structural failures, chance seating, divine intervention. But sometimes, the answer is simple: we don’t know. And we may never know.
The Tao does not unfold according to human logic. It flows as it flows. The falling tree crushes one man but spares another by inches. The same accident that claims hundreds leaves one untouched but bewildered.
In the I Ching, Hexagram 29—Kan (The Abysmal / Water)—teaches us about navigating danger:
“Repetition of danger. The superior man walks in the middle and practices constancy.”
Vishwashkumar Ramesh walked out of the abyss that swallowed so many. The mystery is not just that he lived but that existence itself teeters constantly on the edge of danger. We fool ourselves into thinking we are safe. But each day is an unspoken bargain with the unpredictable.
The Fragility of Being
Confucius offers no comfort either. In The Analects (11:9), he says:
“We do not yet know life—how can we know death?”
Ramesh’s survival confronts us with the limits of knowing. One moment divides the living from the dead, yet no science or philosophy can fully illuminate why.
What does it mean to survive when so many perish?
Why does the cosmos allow one thread in the great web to remain intact while snapping the rest?
The Tao whispers: Do not seek to grasp what cannot be held.
Life Is Neither Fair Nor Unfair
Western notions of justice and fairness shatter under the weight of such events. The Taoist sage would say: the world is not fair or unfair—it simply is.
Lao Tzu reminds us (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 5):
“Heaven and earth are not humane. They regard all things as straw dogs.”
The universe is not sentimental. It does not weigh merit, innocence, or guilt when unleashing its storms. What we perceive as randomness may simply be the Tao’s natural unfolding, beyond our dualistic categories of fairness and unfairness.
The Thin Line Between Control and Surrender
Many live under the illusion of control: flight safety protocols, schedules, insurance policies. But events like this rip that illusion away.
Ramesh boarded that plane as one among many, no more or less prepared for what would come. And yet—he lives.
The Tao invites us not to despair at this loss of control but to surrender to its mystery. Not a passive fatalism—but a deeper alignment with reality.
The I Ching, Hexagram 2—Kun (The Receptive / Earth)—teaches:
“The way of the receptive leads to success. Follow the movement of heaven and earth.”
When we surrender our attachment to knowing why, we enter the receptive state: open, aware, and present to the reality before us.
The Call to Presence
In the face of survival against impossible odds, there is an invitation, one that the Tao constantly extends to each of us:
☄️ To recognize the preciousness of each breath.
☄️ To release our obsession with controlling outcomes.
☄️ To embrace the great mystery of existence with humility.
As Lao Tzu states (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64):
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
“He who clutches, loses.”
Perhaps Vishwashkumar Ramesh now carries a secret the rest of us forget in our busy lives: we are all seated in 11A, every single day. Balanced on a knife’s edge between life and death, known and unknown.
And in that razor’s edge lives the quiet beauty of the Tao.
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Diamond-Michael Scott
the chocolate taoist
"...we are all seated in 11A, every day of our lives." !!!