Sometimes it takes an extreme event to wake us up and realize what we value most in life. The best thing, though, is to learn from someone else’s experience and not have to go through the extreme event ourself. My heart yearns for you to learn from my experience. I’d rather you not have a heart attack or similar event to learn some important life lessons.
Here are lessons from a heart attack – my heart attack:
What Matters Most is People
When I had my heart attack, I asked myself if I had loved people well and if my life mattered. Both of these questions are about how we love and influence other people.
We love people because love is intrinsically important. We all need love and connection. We need to know people and to be known by them. When at the of our life, we will wish we had loved people more.
When we make our life matter, it too is about loving people. We don’t make our life matter for ourself. This is narcissistic. Instead we make our life matter to benefit other people. We make our life matter because we love people and we want the best for them.
Our Future is Wide Open
Agoraphobia is a fear of wide open spaces. A person with this type of fear wants to stay in enclosed spaces – probably pretty small enclosed spaces.
Similar to someone who has agoraphobia, many of us seem to fear wide open choices. We stay enclosed in our familiar choices – many times a small amount of choices. Sometimes we even believe that we don’t have any choices about our life at all.
Believing this is safe. This way we don’t have to risk. What if we start making unusual choices? We might get squashed – told we’re an idiot, that we’re lame. Or we might become a target. Maybe people won’t like us. So we shrink into a reactive state – just responding and reacting to others.
The truth I learned through my heart attack is that all of this fearful, stinking, thinking is mostly untrue. And even if there’s a kernel of truth to it, it’s not the whole truth. If we stay in the “shallow waters,” we’ll regret that we didn’t get out there and truly live. This is the truth.
We are not a product of our circumstances. Rather, to a large degree our circumstances are a product of us and our choices. And the possibilities for our life are uncountable.
I really do hope you can internalize these truths without having to have an event in your life like I had. Get out there. Love people, and make your life matter.
