Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

It was a long day, and I was exhausted. I should have gone to bed. But I couldn't. Instead, I found myself scrolling through my phone, clicking from one article to another, searching for something I couldn't even name.

Maybe I was looking for the right words—something meaningful that could somehow make sense of what happened. Something I could say to the families who lost everything. Something that would help the rest of us understand how to feel, how to respond, how to carry this weight.

I kept reading, hoping to find that perfect phrase or insight that would make it all clearer. Something that would slow down the spinning in my head, stop me from jumping ahead to theories and explanations and all the ways my mind was trying to solve what can't be solved.

But the truth is, this crash—with so many lives lost—isn't a puzzle to figure out. It's just a devastating blow. And my heart aches.

I spent hours searching for words, but maybe words aren't what we need right now. Maybe the answer isn't in finding the perfect thing to say. Maybe it's in learning to sit with the silence, to be comfortable with not having answers.

Maybe the urge to do something, say something, fix something, is just our way of avoiding the hardest truth: that sometimes terrible things happen and there's nothing we can do about it except feel the full weight of it.

Nothing needs to be solved tonight. No perfect response needs to be crafted. No explanation will bring anyone back or ease the pain of the people who are lying awake right now, staring at ceilings, wondering how they'll face tomorrow.

Sometimes the most honest thing we can do is just accept that our hearts are broken too. Accept that we don't have the words. Accept that some things are too big for our understanding, too painful for our explanations, too final for our hope.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe that acceptance—that quiet acknowledgment of loss without trying to dress it up or make it mean something—is the most respectful thing we can offer.

Maybe silence, not words, is what this moment asks of us.