Near-Life Experience

What a place to die, I thought.

I was thousands of miles from home on a business trip. Alone in an office building on a Saturday morning. I figured my body would be discovered Monday morning. Awesome.

I’d been pushing hard for several days on end. Working 18-hour days and not eating regularly combined with my usual subpar sleeping skills to deliver me a little wake-up call.

I’ll spare you all the gory details, but I’ll just say that I started getting light-headed and clammy. I tried to walk it off (apparently, not the brightest move), but that didn’t help. Before too many steps, I had to duck into the cubicle of some woman who left her cardigan hanging over her chair, fighting to stay conscious by holding myself up on Cardigan Woman’s desk.

I knew it would be cruel to call my wife at home, since she was a world away. But my fading consciousness could come up with no alternative. I pulled out my phone and dialed.

“Hi, honey. How are you?”

Silence.

I didn’t know how to put it. But “fine” didn’t seem right.

I finally managed to slur out an “I think I’m having a problem.”

Suzanne, among her many other amazingnesses, was a nurse in London when I met her. Her skills have come in handy innumerable times since, and this was no exception. She calmly but pointedly asked me a battery of questions. Ruling out what I surmised were the biggies, she instructed me to lie down and put my feet up on a chair.

I laid down on Cardigan Woman’s mat and put my feet on her chair. I made a mental note to apologize to her on Monday, if there were going to be a Monday. The grilling continued.

Suzanne then gave me breathing instructions, which I followed (better, I might add, than she followed mine in the delivery room).

Within a couple of minutes, I was feeling better. Within another few minutes, I was able to sit up. Another few minutes, I was able to get up. I confessed to her my abysmal performance in the working hours and hit-and-miss eating and shoddy sleeping and stellar stressing categories. She told me I wasn’t as young as I used to be and gave me some suggestions for things I might do (which mostly consisted of doing the opposite of what I was doing in each of those areas). After working out the timing for a follow-up call, I apologized again, thanked her some more, traded expressions of love, and we hung up.

And a few minutes after that, I was back at work. Yeah, not proud about that.

But as I was trying to get back into the flow of the work, something about going through the pseudo near-death experience and imagining what could have happened if that were one of the biggies made me take stock of what I’ve been doing with this life I’ve been given. Not to get too heavy or anything, but the experience was sufficient to make me ponder these things.

There were a few things I was happy about. Like my family. Like Liken, for all its ups and downs. And I was even grateful for this project I was working on at the moment that maybe wasn’t the most soul-rewarding work I’d ever done, but was nevertheless honorable work that paid well (there’s a lot to be said for being able to feed your family these days).

But there were some things in my life I could see that needed work.

I packed up my stuff and headed back to the hotel to start working on them. But first, I slept.

Nothing like a good near-death experience to make a guy wanna make a few tweaks. Don’t want to spend too much time living at a near-life level. We’re given just this one. In the words of St. Ferris:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”