A few weeks ago, I was watching a repeat episode of Grey's Anatomy. It showed a pregnant woman being brought to the ER following a car accident. She was talking, joking and despite the worries of the doctors, seemed to be doing perfectly well. So the doctors try to figure out what is going on. Finally the doctors request an MRI just to clear her. While she is on the MRI table she codes and is rushed to the OR and dies.
The doctors final explanation is that, she seemed fine and alive and lucid because her body was in a state of shock after the accident and adrenaline was keeping her going. This also made her unaware of the extend of her injuries to her body. But when all the noise quietened during the MRI scan while she was on the table, her body had time to relax and come to terms with the seriousness of the injuries she had sustained during the accident. That is when she died.
The moment I heard this I thought :- Do we not live our lives in the same manner?
I feel that most people these days live on an adrenaline rush. This is because our lives and the world around it move at such a speed. From the moment we wake up we are on the go. Get ready in the morning, eat, if you have kids, feed and dress them up, go to work, drop off kids, make through the day from one meeting to another or one phone call to another, come home or meet friends, do dinner, clean up, shower and go to bed and put everyone to bed. Weekends are worse. So, the body is constantly moving. The mind must move with it to keep up. Like during an accident. Like when we are caught in a current. We are pushed and pulled along with the current. The speed of it keeps carrying us. Life does the same to all of us. It is like a current. Keeps carrying us. And there is no time to think.
It's a mad rush. A run on adrenaline. The only time we are made to stay in one place is when we are sick, or we get too old to do the samethings we did at the same pace when we were younger. But at that point, just like the woman who was unaware to her fatal injuries, we suddenly become conscious of it. Then we die. Sometimes literally but for the most part we become angry, depressed, hopeless, fault finding...a myriad of things.
We have no choice when we get to the point of lying on the table and recognizing the extent of our wounds. It's already too late. Most us try to live life backwards. Regretting, remembering a past that is lost and gone, make up for lost times, right the wrongs....but life cannot be lived backwards. It's just not made that way. Life is not even made for the future. Where we wish on and plan endlessly, only to recognize that it might not unfold the way we wanted. Life is made for right now. All that matters is what we are and what we do and say right now.
When we are living right now, we have a choice. We can act. We don't have to regret, mourn for something that went wrong, try to make wrongs, rights. Neither do we have to wish for things to be better. We can make it better right now. Right now we can feel things and change things. The choice is only available right now. If we can be alive right now, not be lost in the fog of the past or that of the future, we will begin to see clearly and feel clearly.
It's like the woman, if she gave away to the pain of her injuries, the depth of them, perhaps the doctors would have rushed her along, without wasting time for they would have known well in time that something really bad has happened to her.
In the same way, if we allow ourselves to live right now, we might recognize that we are caught in a current, that it is dragging us further and further away from the shore. That struggling against is only going to exhaust us until such time the current ends and we have not strength to swim back. Or we don't even know we are caught in a current, we swim along jolly well until we feel what we are in and fear engulfs us and we drown in fearful desperation. Either way the end brings us no happy ending.
Perhaps there is no happy ending either way.
But when we can become aware of our predicament, we start generating choices. It's how we operate. The awareness for most is the most painful of all. Because it opens our minds and eyes to the reality. Sometimes the reality is not pleasant. Like the woman with the injuries. The coping mechanism was to be oblivious so that she could feel no pain. But that alone killed her. So it's better to feel than not feel. I know many people living life, thinking they are happy, only because they have numbed themselves to the realities of life. But that can happen and go one for so long. When the dust settles, it's going to get ugly.
So might as well wake up and feel the pain, so that you can generate the choices to get out of it or stay it, whichever is the best scenario. But we need to live right now for that. Without the present right in front of you, you cannot find your choices. Without the choices, you are simply being dragged by the currents of life.
Believe you me, it will drag us in its merry path. But when all settles, when we are sick in bed, or waiting to die, when we finally recognize what has really happened, it gets a bit too late to act. It get harder to act. TI gets that much harder to do something to reverse course because time is something that will not wait on us. That is when regret appear, depression, anger and all these emotions that you should not be having, they appear.
So we need to live here and now and recognize what we do to our lives, those around us. This opens us to see things even those that which we don't want to. But there is no other way to live. Life is a pulsating, living process. We need to get plugged in. Not numbed out.
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