that which does not kill us...

When I was 26 I was driving my motorcycle up the street, about two blocks from home, when a car missed a stop sign and T-boned me doing 55kmh (30mph for you imperial types). It changed the course of my life, as near-fatal accidents are wont to do.

And I will be forever grateful.

It was just an accident, one of those things. She was from out of town and lost, looking for the regional hospital, late for an appointment. It was bright and sunny. A big, white cube van was travelling in the opposite direction to me, on the side of the road from which she was coming, The van missed sparing me by about a foot, her car whizzing past its rear bumper, the light color of the van perhaps making it less visible to her searching, distracted eyes, the van hiding her from me until it was way too late.

In emergency I apparently told jokes while they prepped me for surgery, in between throwing up and passing out. I was a minor hospital celebrity for months. The surgery that day was the first of eleven over the next three years, some big, some smaller, some in my home town, some in Vancouver. I learned cool names for things: Acetabulum and trochanteric femur (neither of which should ever be shattered if at all possible), multiple compound fracture, osteomyolitis, Hoffman external fixator, Portacath central lines, hip-to-knee Mercedes incision. 

If you look real close, you can even read my name - don't tell them I stole the x-ray though

If you learn the lingo, the doctors pay more attention to you – take you seriously.

I learned much of the usual near-death stuff too: Life is short and fleeting and ridiculously precious; pain is temporary, and when it isn’t you can either let it make you mental or stronger, occasionally both; people handle tragedy and trauma different ways, but how they handle it doesn’t always tell the whole story about them.

For me alone, I learned that almost any amount of pain is better than to be made dumb by drugs. I could not wait to be off the morphine pump. I went from accident to T3’s in five days. The morphine stole my mind, and I could not forgive it that insult. That’s maybe just me though, I get that.

I learned that, while shit simply does not happen “for a reason”, we can impose reason on anything if we really want to. For me, the accident didn’t change much beyond the length of my left leg, my range of hip flexibility, and the parameters of possible strength for that leg. Everything else can be overcome. After the accident I took up climbing, martial arts, hockey (I play goal – I’m weak on the low glove side, but I compensate), and returned to writing. These things aren’t why the accident happened; They happened after it, in spite of it, to prove that the accident didn’t define who I would be.

If I was inclined to believe in that “a reason for all things” argument, the writing would be, possibly, the only circumstantial proof in support of it. I was forced to go back to school, to university, which I had skipped after high school. Uni led me back to writing. The return to school was the best thing to come out of the whole mess.

But whether you argue design or “shit happens”, it’s what we do with it that counts. It’s what happens after we wake up that defines us, not the accident or the injuries or the staples or the scars. They shape what happens, but we impose the reason and order and purpose and wildness and joy and everything else that is only a potential, the possibility of a possibility, when the trauma happens.

In this sense, trauma is much like waking up every day. We get to impose our spirit and will. Every. Fucking. Day.

I was reminded of this today when a Twitter friend informed me that she was creating a new blog and a new Twitter account. Melissa, my friend, is doing this because, in some fundamental way, she’s more now than the old account and blog can define all by themselves. She’s moving forward from a trauma that has shaped who she is, what her first blog and account were about, and onto new adventures and joys and frustrations and triumphs.

Her choice inspired me and made me smile.

I know other amazing people, both in RL and online who, like Melissa, have transcended far more serious injuries than mine, and who bear scars that run much deeper than my fleshly ones. They fight paralysis, or cancer, or traumas that make my broken bones and scars and really cool x-rays looks small in comparison. And still, they aspire and ascend and are beautiful doing it.

We all have scars; that’s just life. And... scars are beautiful in their own way. I call mine my "portable wealth".

We are not what has happened to us, as much as it may affect the path we take. We are who we choose to be, and who we will choose to become. Any time I doubt that, I check the scars and remember how far I’ve come from there. Or I see someone like Melissa and the amazing things she’s doing for herself and others.

The evidence is all around us. Nietzsche was right. 

the last twenty minutes

First of all, it’s 2011, so I’m changing the font. Fuck yeah.

_

Turns out I wasn’t nearly as “over” my cold as I thought on NYE. Turns out that working that night from eight until four the next morning didn’t help. Casino hours… what are ya gonna do?

So I stumbled through the weekend of dealing cards and then slept Monday and Tuesday, literally. It’s Thursday and I almost feel mostly human again.

All that down time did let me finish watching the World Junior Hockey Championships though, so it wasn’t all bad. I just set my phone alarm to get up for the games and, in between, slept in medicated bliss. I was back on my feet yesterday though, running around, catching up on stuff, and ended up watching the final (Canada vs Russia) in a pub.

Canada lost in a monumental third period meltdown, going from a 3-0 lead at the start of the period to a final, dismal 5-3 loss, allowing five unanswered goals in what will surely go down as one of the greatest chokes of all time. I’ve mentioned before that I watch hockey now for the joy of the game and not to cheer the home team. Mostly. I was a little disappointed.

It was disappointing to watch the Canadian team blow the lead, but not world-ending. More disappointing was that it was a boring game to watch. Canada dominated for forty minutes, and then Russia dominated for twenty. There was very little of that exciting battle between two equals when they go toe to toe in the kind of display of skill and speed that makes hockey the fastest, most exciting game in the world. (Yes, I’m biased. My blog, I’m allowed.)

So I was less disappointed in the final score than I was in the fact that neither team came out to play a full sixty minutes of hockey.

That sounds uncharitable, and it kind of is. These are kids after all, every one of them nineteen or under and subsequently susceptible to vagaries of emotional vacillation tempestuous enough to sink the Titanic.

Nobody will ever know what exactly happened. It looked to me, though, like Canada spent the intermission between the second and the third imagining what the gold medals were going to feel like hanging around their necks, and then came out worried about not losing them. The Russian team, on the other hand, spent the intermission realizing that they had absolutely nothing to lose, and twenty minutes left to them to reach for the brass ring.

And that, I think, made all the difference.

The team that won yesterday didn’t play the whole game as well as they could have, but they played the most important part – the end. Life is like that, yeah? Not too many people manage to figure out their personal legend, to use a Paulo Coelho-ism, early enough to say they were able to play the whole game. I know a lot of people, like me, that didn’t figure that part out until later on.

Most of the time, we give up. We say that we made our choice and now we have to stick with it. We get fixated on the destination and lose sight of the journey, hung up on holding onto what we've got instead of risking it for the sake of the path. We have a career, families, kids, mortgages*, obligations, responsibilities, and we convince ourselves that personal legends have to come second to those things, because we’re used to lists and priorities that have to be linear.

News flash: They don’t have to be. You can love your kids and spouse and still love yourself and pursue whatever it is that makes your blood sing. And if you can, and if I can, then we all can.

When it comes down to it, how we start is less important than how we end. Lots of us have great ideas, brilliant starts, and then, somewhere in the middle, lose the thread. It’s a marathon, a journey, after all, and there’s lots of time to get distracted, or sidetracked, or bogged down. Win or lose, it truly is how we play the game, the effort we put in to the end.

I lucked out. I truly feel that I found my little bit of destiny to chase after, and I was in a pretty flexible personal position to make drastic changes in order to chase after that fucker. I get that it isn’t always appropriate to flip everything upside down in a life-inversion like I did in order to make changes, but there are always ways. I’m surrounded by amazing people, online and in the 3-D world, that are doing it, chasing personal legends, making it up as they go along, carving out a path through the jungle towards a mountaintop and a cave full of bliss.

They’re reaching for it as if there was nothing to lose, and I find it inspiring to see. It inspires me every day to get in the chair and finish stronger than I started, the skate to the buzzer. Because I have nothing to lose except me, and the only way to do that is to stop trying. Let me say that again: We have nothing to lose but ourselves, and the only way to do that is to stop trying.

I don’t usually do the question asking thing here, but I will today, because I’m truly interested in hearing your truth. What is it in your life that’s worth playing hard for right to final buzzer?

* The word mortgage finds its roots in the French. It literally means “death pledge”. Not surprisingly, they don’t use that particular phrase in French-speaking lands to describe contracts to buy houses. Go figure…

‘I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down.’ Mitch Hedberg

I’m leaving on a trip in a few days to the UK with a five day stopover in Vancouver on the way. I’ll apologize now to the 1.3 people that may or may not have fallen asleep at the computer when I wrote about it before, because I’m going to write about it again.

When I started my life inversion process a little over a year ago travelling was one of the things that I really wanted to include in the new life. I wasn’t sure exactly how that was going to dovetail into the minimalist schtick that I wanted to imbue the new version of me with, but I knew that I wanted to see a bit more of the world, see a few new things, maybe learn a new language or two. I wanted to rediscover the vagabond in me.

Still didn’t know what that was going to look like though…

Last June, when I went to my Grandmother’s 90th birthday party/family reunion, I was talking to my Dad who happens to live in the UK. I’d never visited him there even though he’s been across the pond for around twenty-five years now.

For the previous ten years I’d used the “I don’t have any time” excuse fairly effectively, but part of the inversion included not making any more excuses. That resolution, combined with the flexible schedule of trying to be a writer, pretty much fucked up the “no time” doctrine. The other natural concern in regards to long trips would naturally be money, and the inversion, including it’s divestment of material goods and accompanying embrace of minimalist sentimentality, also naturally includes a lower revenue stream.

So I could have claimed poorness, but that would still be an excuse.

What to do? I cashed in some RSP’s. Yes, I know… sooo irresponsible! Not to me though. Not anymore. I cashed in the RSP’s, freed up a bit of cash and made plans, for real.

My decision was validated (if you believe in that sort of thing) this spring when my Dad had a coronary arrhythmia. Nothing serious, but enough to prevent him from flying in May when he and his wife were suppoed to go to Africa together. (It's a big visit to one of her sons and couldn’t be canceled altogether, so she planned to go and he planned to stay back). My timing fit perfectly into their schedule allowing her to go and him to not be alone. That’s either a grand coincidence or serendipity – and I don’t really care which one it is.

The trip also works on a more selfish level: I get a nice base from which to start an exploration of Europe and the UK. The itinerary is humble this time: England, Scotland, a bit of France and Belgium. Hopefully, after I sell the novel and actually consider myself as employed as I ever wish to be again, I can go back and do some more hopping. I’m looking forward to Scotland more than I allow myself to admit most days.

In the crossing of the Rubicon of Hadrian’s Wall there is, for me, a romantic sense of going home.

But no expectations… really.

The trip is about exploration of a primarily internal landscape, my emotional topography, as I see places that have only existed in pictures and my imagination, and as I seek to complete repairs to a relationship that has been in a certain state of disrepair and renovation for a very long time. So much to do.

And, yeah, I still have to finish editing the manuscript so I can have something worth talking about in a query letter. Which reminds me…

‘Whenever we need to make a very important decision it is best to trust our instincts, because reason usually tries to remove us from our dream, saying that the time is not yet right. Reason is afraid of defeat, but intuition enjoys life and its challenges.’ Paulo Coelho

Ah, it’s been a while. Let’s see if I remember how to do this.

I came across this quote last night and fell in love with it, especially in light of some recent decision making I’ve had to do. I’ll try to provide some brief background to put some of this in context.

I’ve mentioned before that, about a year ago now, I quit my ‘good, solid career’ at a casino in Alberta, sold or gave away almost everything I owned (except the laptop, climbing gear and the library, of course), and took a job care-taking a remote ski lodge for the summer and fall. I did this so that I could finally, finally, finally write the novel I’ve been putting off for, oh, the last dozen years or so (145,000 words and counting, so it’s at least really long).

It’s been a liberating experience in far too many ways to start listing here, one of which is that I’ve had the time and freedom to start listening to my intuition again; to start paying attention to the intrinsic me that I’d effectively buried under the excuses of being too busy, too successful, too focused, too material and too completely unhappy with all of the above. I chose to pursue being a ‘me’ that I preferred to the one I’d been living as for the previous decade, even though that ‘me’ was only hypothetical then, a distant memory of me that I kept polished on a shelf like an old trophy.

I should say first that I’m a fan of using a reasonable logic tree to make decisions and always have been. My brain works fairly well most of the time, and I enjoy the process of turning the Rubik’s cube of a problem around in my hands for a while so I can really know all of the sides before I start. What I’ve started to notice and appreciate this year, more than ever before, is that I usually come back to my instinctual preference in the end anyway. And while it could be argued that I’m engaging in self-fulfilling prophecy, the logical part of me double checks for that too, so I think I’m being relatively accurate.

Rarely in life do we come across a hard decision that is clear cut or black and white. They usually involve permutations and dynamics that leave us with a choice to make, and usually a hard one commensurate to the nature of the problem we are facing. The pros and cons sometimes just don’t reveal a strong enough advantage for either option to make the decision easy. But I’d relied too much on the ability to reason to make decisions for the first ten years of the 21st century. My reason and the accepted measures of North American consumerist culture had conspired to lead me into a string of decisions that looked good on my CV and revenue stream, but were making me unhappy, unfulfilled, a bad friend and a bad son.

And then I dropped out. That decision, back in February of ’09 was an intuitive one. The care-taking position was in the tube, a possibility but not a guaranteed bridge yet, and then a few circumstances conspired to allow me the moment of clarity I needed to make the jump. According to reason and societal matrices it was the wrong decision at the wrong time, but it was instinctually correct and it proved very, very right for me.

It was a challenging experience, breaking out of that rut. I found that the writing process I’d longed for was hard to establish, that I had a deeply rooted fear of failure to try to dig my way around (I’d known it was there, but foolishly thought it would just run away crying when I finally made the ‘big move’). Focusing more on family and friends came easily, fortunately, and that was an anchor while I floated around trying to find my groove. So I spent large pieces of the summer hiking and being quiet, alone in a beautiful lodge on top of a mountain with the trees, pine martins, eagles and Harriett, the lodge cat to divert my attention when I needed it. It was the best thing that could have happened, and that time and solitude was invaluable in my personal journey from the self-inflicted constraint and restraint of my professional career to a new freedom that could be, and is, liberating and productive at the same time.

I wanted to value creativity. I wanted to prioritize writing. I wanted to focus on the close and valuable friendships I’d been fortunate to cultivate and maintain. I wanted to be there for family. I wanted to live a life with as few compromises as possible. I wanted to make a difference somehow and not use a foolish responsibility to a corporation or lifestyle that didn’t care for me or anyone else at all as an excuse for not chasing my dreams. I wanted to achieve escape velocity and pursue a better version of myself; one that I knew was in here, somewhere.

Just last week my father, who lives in the UK, was rushed to the hospital with a cardiac arrhythmia. I found out about it four days later, by which time he was hours away from heading home with a new regimen of medication to control it, so it wasn’t an emergency by then. I had been planning a visit to him this spring already. Much of the timing of that trip was dependent on when or if I would be needed back up on the mountain and I’d been wrestling with the itinerary for several weeks, waiting for word from the lodge about whether they needed a care-taker this year, trying to figure out how to make the trip and avoid as much sideways rain as possible, wanting to fit my visit around my dad’s busy schedule so I could spend time with him. All of this was swirling around in my head for a few days after I heard about his condition and I was getting nowhere.

Then I stopped and asked myself, “What was your first inclination?” It was, of course, to rush to him and help. And I knew what I had to do.

Racing across the pond isn’t required, but there will be a period this spring during which my presence in Jolly Old will be helpful. It isn’t at all the most convenient time for the lodge or for me, and might just make the lodge impossibility this year, but it is the best time for him. That’s the priority and that was my instinct in the beginning. Reason led me to worry too much about my summer job and become distracted from that priority, if only for a few days. I was distracted by that cultural conscience that tells us, especially those of us in North America, that we have a duty to our society to work hard and be busy beavers. There’s nothing wrong with working hard, but it’s not a priority that can compare to family or friends. My decision became very easy.

So I’ll be posting blogs from the UK for a few weeks this spring, later than I’d first intended, when I might have been on the mountain already, and I’ll be as happy about it then as I was the moment I stopped reasoning and trusted myself. Instead of hesitating in a sub-conscious nod to reason, I’m enjoying a life of making the right decisions without compromises. My bank account might suffer, but my heart is singing.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

It was a driving day today on my little tour of a selection of my ‘friends who live far away’ just in time for the holiday season. Time and money have made the trip shorter than I might have preferred, but I’m thankful for the opportunity to see even a few of those that I respect and love the most. To those I couldn’t reach, Namaste to you too. J

Being a road day, there isn’t much time now to dedicate to a blog entry, but here’s what I got:

I took just about the most indirect, direct route from Red Deer to Cranbrook that I could this afternoon, down through Kananaskis country and the Alberta foothills region. While I’m still happy to be back in BC to live, this is a region that has to be seen to be believed and appreciated, and I can’t say that I saw enough today, that I’ve ever seen enough, or that it’s even possible. Rockies to the west and ranch land and forest on every side, this is truly a beautiful place to move through.

I was fortunate enough to have plenty of time, and so I was able to appreciate the moments, views and solitude of a solo drive more than usual; certainly more than I ever did when I travelled this road in a rush because I had a time restriction. It made me think about all of the times I didn't appreciate this or so many other drives, and about how I was always rushing around doing nothing critical, missing the chance to stand up and live in favor of a maze designed to keep me distracted and blind. Today, for me, was a very ‘live’ day in spite of being on the road for most of it. Tucked in my shaking, rattling, yet very comfortable ’99 TJ, I rolled through a beautiful day and languished happily in the swirl of my own thoughts.

The trip was lazy, contemplative and relaxed, and it made me think of Thoreau. Hence the quote.

I've always loved driving alone for this very feature: I can think and let my thoughts run wherever they choose too. Today I spent time just being thankful for friends and family, something that’s been a major theme for me this year, thinking about the concept of a resource based society instead of one focused on monetary and economic drivers, and blissfully daydreaming about what something a little closer to utopia might look like.

The daydream wasn’t completely unrealistic. I also sent time thinking about all of the obstacles there are between here and there, all the stumbles and leaps we’ll have to make to pursue it, let alone ever come close to reaching for it in a real way. I enjoyed the mental exercise of it all, trying to do hypothetical problem solving around bouts of simply enjoying the dream of a better world.

So, in spite of spending most of the day in a POS Jeep, I felt alive today. The world seemed vibrant and nothing seemed too far off or too impossible. I was pleasantly optimistic without qualification, and that, for me, is a holiday worth remembering.

I may not have been left with too much time to write, but the urge to pound a few words out was too strong to resist, and I have to say – that inspiration is simply one of my favorite things.