My Ephemeral Arteries

Life is so short. What a cliché, but true, true, true. Do you ever have a fear of lying on your death bed and wishing you would have done something that you somehow never did? Or perhaps a whole mess of somethings? Well, I have a fear of just lying on my death bed. But beyond that, I would hate to have that feeling. As Conan said, "Time enough for rest in the grave". Which I guess was lately translated by the savvy Nike marketing machine as "Just do it". I wonder if they gave Conan credit. That's Conan of Cimmeria, by the way, not NBC.

So what can you do to avoid this last-minute, full-of-regrets situation? It's easy to just picture yourself changing your life so that you scale Himalayan peaks and swim the Amazon River with anacondas every other weekend. But actually getting out and doing these things in this McDonald's, NBC, internet, waffle house, lawn mowing, dog-walking, diaper-changing world is very hard. Our lives are loaded up with inertia that has to be overcome for anything different to happen.

We have been doing some really fun things, things that challenge us and things that we will remember, even on our respective death beds. But they are very difficult to set up and execute, they require enormous resolve. How can we make them happen more often and keep our jobs and homes?

One way is to lower our expectations of what constitutes a death-bed remembering-worthy memory. We can be Zen about it. You can have great moments at the park. Or the mall, I guess. You don't always have to be out in the wild, facing challenges that would scare Sir Edmund. You can have little adventures within range of the cell phone towers. I guess it depends on what satisfies our internal longing for adventure.

I just know that I don't remember the last time I was at the mall, but I can recall with absolute crystal clarity the very moment that we realized that we were almost out of water in the wilds of the Grand Canyon, and it was hot as Hades and there was no shade and the nearest water was, BIG MAYBE, a hard unknown hike from where we were. And it would be up to us to save ourselves. And saving ourselves gave us all something we will never forget. Try that at the library.

Challenging myself. I guess that's what does it for me. I need to feel that I am face to face with something that will put me to the test, for real. And if I pass the test, I will know myself anew, I will see that I really am alive, and capable. And if I fail, well, I guess I will have learned something as well, which I can muddle over as I fly to the nearest trauma center in a jet helicopter. If I am lucky.

That is not to say there are not memorable moments in everyday life. There are, and those moments are what this blog is really about for me. What I record here are mostly the little, humble things. What silly thing Zach did. Heather on a swing. Why we want to strangle Coco this time.

I think that we need both kinds of moments. A few terrifying or challenging or exhilarating times that test us and we remember them like they are etched on glass. And many, many small ones that add up to something really big and wonderful, and maybe it's that big wonderful thing that we remember in our last moments after all.