One year ago today, I began. It wasn’t this website, but it was something, anything. I had to do something.
Tired of the charade and sick of waiting, life or death hinged on March 20th, 2022’s actions. Dramatic? Certainly. Necessary? Beyond.
I was on vacation, back in Colorado, of course, three months from graduating residency, and seven years removed from medical school’s genesis, and all I could think about was doing something. My tolerance for the quitting fantasy was nil; my belief in deliverance inside medicine had long since evaporated, and further inaction risked insanity. Every second that ticked felt like death, and when you think about it, it was.
Thus, while on vacation, on the day we were set to leave, I decided to do something. What I felt like doing was writing. So, I wrote, with no outcome in mind.
3.20.22
The way I live powers the impact I want to have. I want to be bold. I want to leave no stone unturned. I want to own my life with full intentionality, riding each wave with style, my style, in a way that encourages people around me to do the same. Words do not open doors. Thinking does not open doors. Daily, repetitive action opens doors and will open me back into myself. To change and become “classic”, I must carve into my soul new dictums, such as “Banish all thought of retreat, brothers. No avenue remains but to advance, and no alternative save victory or death” (from Steven Pressfield’s Tides of War).
Yesterday, I passively meandered inside of Rocky Mountain National Park, that gnawing sense of desperation and hopelessness filling my heart. I yearned to scream, to call out, to get out, to get angry, to cry. Half dead already. Our actions contribute to our death, every day we either get closer to the virtue of aliveness or fall closer to our death. Daily. I shall hence forth beckon to my soul, “did I take actions that clawed back an inch of dirt from death, or did I move further down the slippery slope?” On this trip it was eye opening, it cannot just come for you, a lesson I should have learned many times already, but that aliveness is EARNED. No one gets aliveness bestowed. Actions create it. Will the call of the alarm invoke my potentiality, or will I await resistance to bury me?
Really I must do it for me. There is one life here, one chance, one shot. This is all one big game, one big risk, one game that does end though, and I know not when the buzzer will go off. When that buzzer does go off, will I have regrets? Will I know that I gave it my best? Will those around me respect the person I was? Will I have made others around me better for my actions and my love? Yes. I will try. I will be alive. I will make mistakes. I will go deep. I will not stop. I will be fucking unstoppable… as the alternative is known and untenable.
Well, that’s a man possessed and… that’s what it took. I understood, there, my led life was, as described, untenable and no longer compatible with me. I’d arrived at a destination where trading time, for anything, didn’t pay the rent. And it still doesn’t. Have I been “fucking unstoppable”? Hardly, as I regularly cop-out and take low roads, but I am learning and growing while taking lessons on the chin.
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The last 365 days seems like five years. The day after the journal entry, I shaved my head, which officially baptized my path (what this did exactly, I’m not sure, but I was compelled). I graduated residency, moved, got married, quit my job, and launched into the void, that uncertain place I still call home. Often, I find myself considering easier means, paths back to comfort, and compromises. It’s scary still, as I don’t know how this whole leaving medicine choice will work out. There’s a lot on the line.
But shit, it’s not half as scary as the terror I felt on the morning of March 20th, 2022, where I felt half-dead while living. Without action, I knew what awaited me. Choosing life sometimes means choosing to do anything. It’s hard to describe, but in that moment, there was immense faith in myself and a higher power. That’s what makes the void tenable.
Gotta keep taking action, asking questions about what I want, what I love, and what I want to cherish as I take my last breaths. One year of doing just that, has me owning wholeness more and more each day.
I wrote it then, but know it now and hope to live it: aliveness is earned, not bestowed.
(Photo Caption: Evidence of the period’s doing-whatever-is-necessary haircut ethos)
But that photo isn’t Colorado. That looks like Kolob Canyons, after scrambling up a hillside without a trail.
Indeed! Six days later, I was in Zion, scrambling up a hillside, with a shaved head!
“Gotta keep taking action, asking questions about what I want, what I love, and what I want to cherish as I take my last breaths.”
Yes. This is what I call the “deathbed analysis.” When you are lying on your deathbed will you say something like, “I wish I had spent more time in the office and published more papers,” or something more like, “I wish I had listened when my wife said that she wanted to spend more time with me”?
It’s hard to go terribly wrong when you focus on the long view.
“Deathbed analysis”, I like that term. It frames our choices and impact because you can really feel it, there. The long view has certainly saved me from many fear-motivated decisions. Thinking about death has become very helpful practically. Reading Ryan Holiday’s work as he reviews stoicism is likely the cause!