DID YOU DIE, THOUGH?

“One of the biggest lessons I learned from nearly dying of cancer is the importance of loving myself unconditionally. In fact, learning to love and accept myself unconditionally is what healed me and brought me back from the brink of death.”
~ Anita Moorjani

For the record, I didn’t nearly die from cancer.

I nearly died from a heart attack.

According to my parents who saw me laid out on the floor at 5am on Thanksgiving Day, I was lifeless.

Dead. For a few minutes.

I didn’t hear any of the commotion they made.

My mother screaming for my father to wake up.

My father grabbing my arm and trying to pull me off the floor.

Both of them realising that I had stumbled from the bedroom to the bathroom and shit myself along the way.

The body suddenly evacuating like that is a sign of death.

I missed their reaction entirely, not to mention the mess I made.

One of my arteries was fully blocked, the others weren’t far behind and the last thing I remembered was trying to turn the door handle of my mother’s bedroom.

I was going to let her know that I wasn’t feeling too good.

Instead, I passed out and fell backwards into a spare bedroom, where they found me not moving and not breathing.

Then I woke up.

I have no idea how.

One moment I was gone, then I came back.

Wasn’t my time to die, I guess.

I’m not going to bore you with all of the details of how I got to this point. Health can be a complicated matter and I’m still learning about my condition and the contributing factors. There are enough experts already out there selling their version of health and wellness. No need for another one.

(I will say that I’m not vaccinated. Don’t want your mind to wander into conspiracies…)

As I write this nearly nine weeks after undergoing a triple bypass, I feel almost fully healed. It’s miraculous, so I’m running with the momentum.

Instead, I wanted to share some insights that came to me while I was in hospital, basically wired to a monitor 24/7 and unable to move far from the bed, and then my immediate thoughts after starting the recovery process.

This is in no way intended to be some guide or set of recommendations. It’s all my non-professional opinion. But I think we don’t talk about the mental, emotional and spiritual side of sickness enough. It takes more than a physical toll and the hidden scars can last a long time after the wounds have healed.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice.

Health is mostly, but not entirely genetic.
I need to make a necessary distinction between health and fitness here. Fitness is performance related and has an impact on health. Health is the underlying state of vitality and wellbeing. Prior to my heart attack, I was someone who was considered to be well above average fitness. But my health was declining rapidly.

I had every test you can get - multiple MRIs, X-Rays, 24 blood tests.

I even had my teeth checked and got screened for every STD.

The conclusion was: genetics.

Seriously?

What the fuck does that mean?!!

That’s a bitter pill to swallow for an admittedly uptight 46 year old who worked out consistently and had never been to a hospital before.

I know what to eat, how to sleep, how to gain muscle, lose fat and all of that modern shit that has you balls deep in youtube playlists when you should probably be relaxing and enjoying the flow of life.

I thought I had this shit figured out already and was well on my way to dying of old age.

Then again, everyone in my mother’s family had died from heart disease in their sixties.

I felt ripped off by a decade.

But they were all obese alcoholics.

I’ve never been fat and stopped drinking years ago.

All of those nights at the gym instead of the bar seemed like a waste of time.

Eating meal prep, weighing food and counting calories for years didn’t get me as far as I had hoped.

I wondered if I’d ever jump on a plane at short notice again, fly 30 hours to a remote location and hike up a few mountains without a care in the world.

I even wondered whether that made me sick in the first place and I shouldn’t have been so extreme.

I’m still wrestling with the idea that I was on some collision course with sickness at such a young age when I thought I was living life right, but the facts are the facts.

You can drive for longevity and be gone in a split second.

It’s rare of course, and nobody has the answer as to why that is and how to avoid it.

Luck of the draw, son. You’re somewhere on the bell curve with the rest of the human zoo.

We all want more control over our lives and the ability to create specific outcomes, but health isn’t that predictable despite all of the principles and probabilities.

(There’s probably a trading analogy in here but I’m not sharp enough right now to drop that zinger or platitude).

The important thing to note is that every condition can be improved, and we can be more aware. Some factors are hereditary, others are environmental, but we have the ability to influence the path these conditions take.

The more you believe a familial predisposition to an illness can be prevented, controlled or even cured, the more likely you are to be the exception to the ancestral rule.

It pays to be (a little bit) paranoid
Complacency kills. Skepticism is survival.

The biggest mistake I made not getting myself fully checked out. A little skepticism about whether I was as healthy as I felt could have avoided all of this.

It absolutely pays to get bloodwork and tests done way before you hit the recommended age of 40. Knowing more about yourself, particularly any genetic “mutations”, how much stress you’re under hormonally and how you react to food and your environment is the most comprehensive way to invest in your long term health.

It’s ironic that the very environment that has given us more information and access than ever has also made us the most sick.

I was caught up in the rat race of long hours, leveraging technology for speed and thinking a bunch of gym classes would provide enough balance. A classic example of burning the candle at both ends and coping with modern wellness myths. Too much action, not enough mindfulness, although I did a lot to correct that in the last five years.

Seeking purpose and studio yoga only gets you so far, though. You’re kidding yourself if you think that’s holistic and integrating mind, body and spirit.

It was too little, too late in my case and could have been fatal.

Unplug if you want to live
Seriously. Fuck the Matrix.

I implore you to fully assess your degree of mindfulness in this life.

It’s not enough to achieve and accumulate stuff. If you want to live your best life, just be more mindful.

Actually take in your surroundings and eliminate the distractions.

The glory of all creation is right in front of you and you keep missing it because you’re looking for a better feeling.

Too many of us live in a bubble of education, employment, lifestyle and politics. These systems provide us with powerful tools but without mindfulness, they’re just using you and draining the energy you need to thrive.

You’ll know who your ride and die friends are
The hardest part of all of this, at least initially, was simply telling people what happened.

I felt extremely embarrassed. I mean, I used to be fit corporate guy from London who worked all day and mocked tiredness and stress.

I reached out to friends and colleagues and most responded with a little sympathy, others with shock.

Some didn’t reply at all. They just read the message and didn’t bother to respond.

If you want to shatter your ego, get left on seen by someone you like with a message about a near death experience.

I imagined how my funeral could have been empty if all of these people had never found out.

Then I dealt with the fact that a lot of them didn’t actually care anyway and wouldn’t have shown up.

Then I got over it.

Nobody cares, it’s the truth.

It’s also a key to personal freedom. Treat it that way.

No regrets… surprisingly.
The well trodden trope about people on their deathbeds being full of regrets isn’t strictly true.

I didn’t experience anything but peace and acceptance once I knew my situation.

I had a strong desire to live for sure, but I wasn’t resisting the circumstances or finding a way to be a victim.

I handed over my life to God and the UK’s National Health Service.

I believe we have the capacity to express free will in every situation, and in that sense we co-create reality with our Creator.

Different religions have different takes on this, but the path isn’t always the complete experience.

What I felt was I had a choice to make in the moment.

Divine timing is the choice that’s available to you in every moment to be closer to God or lost in your mind, absent of love and consciousness. I’ll write more about that another time…

But some familiar embarrassment before the peace….
Here’s something very few people know about me.

I hate making mistakes.

Fucking up in any way is unacceptable.

Of course, that means I tend to fuck up more than I should. That’s how unresolved insecurities tend to work themselves out, in self sabotaging behaviour.

I would be mortified to be sick or weak in front of my parents, so of course I nearly died in front of them.

The Universe has a sense of humour.

All insecurity is rooted in fear, and your self judgment will ultimately be your downfall.

At the same time, you are only given the lessons you can handle.

An Apple watch will tell you you’re going to die
That’s not a product endorsement.

I got 4 high heart rate warnings in the month before I ended up in hospital.

Don’t ignore those.

Letting go of outcomes
If you want to live a full life, let go of everything.

Have and pursue whatever you want, but let go of all of it.

Do not be defined by anything.

Life is mental, not material.

You really don’t know what’s going to happen.

Nothing is promised. Life is extremely precious and fragile.

The only way to be at peace is to learn to let go.

Freedom is having everything and being attached to nothing.

Resentment and victimhood has to go
Nearly dying wasn’t a problem for me.

Being sick was a huge problem. It really fucked with my identity.

And, I just wanted to blame everything outside of myself.

It took a lot of conversations and confessions to deal with the vulnerability of being confined to a bed for 41 days, with teams of professionals and friends and family coming in and out, prodding and commenting on how I looked, giving me their good opinions and never really seeing what I was going through in my mind.

I even wanted to blame people I’d stopped talking to years ago for every heartbreak they caused.

After a while, I had to reframe my notions of justice and causality.

There is a universal law of cause and effect, and it doesn’t play out in the same emotional ways we like to cling to when we’re playing the victim.

It’s about taking full responsibility, as all actions eventually come back around.

Everything I felt towards the world just pointed right back at me.

As the saying goes, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you.

You can only battle personal demons for so long before you risk residing in the darkness forever. You become that which occupies your attention.

Low vibrations get you nowhere.

I had a premonition of my own death
Two days before I collapsed, I had a vivid dream about reaching an inflection point in my life.

A literal fork in the road.

On one side was this unreal paradise, where nothing seemed familiar.

On the other, a vision of the future.

I chose to run to my future without hesitation.

I now believe the unreal paradise was a depiction of heaven.

My instincts were to stick around a while longer.

There’s some work to be done.

And yet I still needed a shit ton of luck
It would be ridiculous of me to have gone through this experience just a few months ago and pretend to be enlightened by it.

Evolution is an arduous process and I’m no saint.

It would be nice to walk into the forest one day and come out arm in arm with God.

Such people do exist. I’ve met a few of them.

It would be so easy to fall into righteousness and say it’s all determinism and fate is real.

I think it’s better to be humble and give credit where it’s due.

The ambulance arrived within an hour. That doesn’t always happen.

I happened to be visiting my parents when I haven’t lived in the UK for years.

They live near one of the best hospitals in Europe for treating heart disease.

I don’t know what destiny holds, but those are some very good cards to be dealt when shit hits the fan.

Quality over quantity… same as always
The glass has always been half full.

To use another metaphor, your cup should never be empty.

Positivity and gratitude require more than personal responsibility. They require presence.

Presence has a lot of opportunity cost, but presence is the only opportunity that never goes away.

In some ways, you have to reject modernity and its endless distractions that come dressed as information and improvement.

Modern methods and their advocates would have you believe that there are keys to peak experience. Bulletproof ways of being fitter, living longer, getting richer and being happier.

At some point, all of that information and seeking leaves you with an empty cup.

You end up going through the motions with no vigour and vitality to pour into life.

Mark Twain famously said: “Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72”.

The simple proposition I was reminded of was not to chase life so much that you miss out on moments.

A doctor told me that my bypass surgery would guarantee me a good 15 years of life.

I did the math on reaching 61 and immediately wondered whether that was good enough, as if more is necessarily better and I was somehow entitled to 80 or 90.

Here comes the self judgment again.

Of course, nobody really knows when they’re going to go. Doctors are obliged to make certain statements, but nobody can really tell you how to live.

I’d take 15 high quality years over 30 mediocre ones.

Longevity isn’t the biggest goal for me. Presence is.

You get the most out of every moment, or you live by the numbers.

Love,

P.