When the Ocean Broke Through My Door
The tsunami didn’t just come to sweep us away. It wiped away every excuse I had left.
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🎙️ This is Episode 1 of the new solo series of Bold Conscious Connections Podcast.
Available now on YouTube. (On Spotify / Apple Podcast coming soon).
December 26th, 2004.
I was still in bed when my wife screamed:
“Run.”
By the time I stood up, the ocean was already in the room.
We were on vacation in a village near the southern coast of Sri Lanka. Our friend’s home sat just 100 feet from the shore. That morning, the Indian Ocean rushed inland with a wall of water—30 feet high, moving at 60 to 80 miles per hour. It tore through the walls, flooding everything.
I grabbed my glasses and ran.
My wife, my daughter, 19, our two sons—2 and 6 years old, had their own experiences.
I took the baby on my shoulder. We made it out of the house.
But then the wave hit.
I was pulled under.
What survival stripped away
I don’t remember how long I was submerged.
Time does something strange in those moments—it collapses.
When I came back up, I couldn’t speak. My voice was gone. My glasses were gone. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. I couldn’t find my children.
My daughter spotted our two-year-old clinging to a branch.
Later, someone found our six-year-old wrapped around a tree trunk with his eyes shut.
Eventually, we were reunited. Rescued. Barefoot. Shaken. Alive.
There was this moment—just the five of us, huddled together, soaked and shivering—that cracked something open in me.
Not intellectually.
Viscerally.
Because in that moment, everything I thought was important dissolved.
The job title.
The Morgan Stanley paycheck.
The illusion of control.
I left Wall Street two months later
I had spent 18 years on Wall Street. I was 49 years old.
And yet, it was that barefoot moment that taught me what security actually means.
Within two months, I resigned.
No master plan. No clear financial roadmap.
Just clarity I could no longer ignore.
3 questions I want you to ask yourself
I’m not sharing this to be dramatic.
I’m sharing it because I coach people every week who are still waiting.
Waiting for the right time.
For permission.
For the kids to graduate.
For the next promotion to finally “make sense.”
For someone to say, “You can go now.”
But here’s what I learned:
The idea that you’re stuck?
That’s a story.
And one you can stop telling.
Ask yourself:
What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
If your time were cut short tomorrow, what would you regret not doing?
What’s one small, quiet step you could take this week toward the life you want?
This is the first solo episode of Season 5 of Bold Conscious Connections.
There will be more stories like this—raw, unpolished, lived.
If it stirred something in you, I hope you’ll stay with me.
🎧 Watch the full episode on YouTube
💬 Leave a comment here or on the YouTube channel —what’s your “tsunami” moment?
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Raju Panjwani | Former Morgan Stanley Managing Director | 5X Entrepreneur |
I help high-level executives turn decades of hard-won experience into lives and ventures that can mean something more meaningful, without losing the security they’ve spent years building.