The Power of Thought

The arrhythmias began the final day of my junior year in high school. Without any provocation, my heart would go from a normal 60 beats per minute (bpm) to an astounding 300 bpm. As soon as my heart rate jumped so high, my heart stayed at the fast rate. As you can imagine, at 300 bpm my energy level would quickly decrease. To bring my heart rate back to normal, I would go to the hospital where they would shock my heart and bring my rate back to normal.

That day, the last day of school my junior year, was just the beginning of the struggles I would have with arrhythmias. Over the next few years I would go in and out of arrhythmias, always ending in a hospital trip to get shocked. More than anything, getting shocked was inconvenient. Every time I went to the hospital, I knew that I would be there for at least five hours. I came to dread arrhythmias because I didn’t want to take time out of my schedule to go to the hospital.

This dread lead to hyper observance. I would monitor my rate rate several times every hour to make sure that my heart rate was where it should be. But as the weeks went on I began to go into more and more arrhythmias. Eventually, it became clear that the increased frequency of arrhythmias was my fault! My hyper observance was inadvertently causing me to go into arrhythmias. My preoccupation of arrhythmias stressed me to the point of arrhythmias.

With practice, I learned how to control my thoughts so that I my attention was not focused on my heart rate. The frequency of my arrhythmias drastically decreased and my quality of life increased, all because I changed the focus of my thoughts.

Live Like you are Dying

The other day I was thinking about what it was like walking into an operating room to have open heart surgery. At 10 years old while in the preoperative waiting room the nurses offered me medication to make me drowsy, but I refused. I didn’t want to be asleep because I wanted to spend the time with my family. Many patients are nervous before surgery for various reasons. They do not know what the outcome of the operation will be, or are afraid it is going to hurt. But not me. No matter what happened, I knew that everything would be okay. This assurance, as I came to discover later, was the result of living my life as if I were about to die.

Now this does not mean that I thought I was going to die. Nor does it mean that I was ready to die. Rather, because of the way that I had lived, my conscious was clear.

When people think about how they would live like they were dying, often thoughts of all the things they want to do before they die come up. Travel to Paris, swim with a dolphin, attend a Broadway show, or stay in a five star hotel. While all these things would be wonderful to do, I have come to understand that they are not the things that constitute living like you are dying.

Throughout my life I have come up with my own definition of what it means to live like you were dying. The definition is really more of a question that you can ask yourself. When you die, what is it that you would like others to say about the person you were? I want all those who know me to describe me with similar terms. Kind, loving, faithful, trustworthy, and disciplined.

Living like you are dying is not about cramming in life experience at the very end. It is about becoming the kind of person you want to be so that you leave behind the kind of legacy you want to leave. It’s about the lives you touch and the help you render. With this definition in mind, we should all be living like we are dying, because life is short.