I had a near death experience (NDE) when I was young. There wasn’t a bright light. Jesus and dead relatives didn’t come to greet me. In fact, nothing about my NDE seemed to be like everybody else’s. I just went into a strange gray place and waited for the outcome. I felt like there was a doorway to another kind of life if I actually died, but I didn’t get to see what was on the other side. To tell the truth, it wasn’t very exciting, but the experience left me with a hurried feeling that I have to accomplish things, but it was tempered by the fact that I was still young and had a lot of time. The afterlife was giving me very mixed messages, especially since I wasn’t told what I’m supposed to do. “Why am I here?” is a question that’s been asked for millennia. There has to be a point to it all, right? Is it to make art, or touch a child’s life, or stop war, or save the planet? Whatever it is, hurry!!
Sometimes I get very impatient with time wasters. My ex was a master at it. Waiting my turn to talk to customer service in India is an exercise in misery. “You’re wasting my life!!!” screams in my head while I listen to canned music on the phone. Maybe that time could’ve been used to cure cancer, but I’ll never get it back. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a clue how to cure cancer. Maybe I could’ve learned how in all those cumulative hours with customer service? How many people have died from cancer because customer service sucked out everyone’s life essence with elevator music?
Two different people have told me about hellish NDEs. These people were nasty before their NDEs and neither seemed to think they had to change afterwards. One woman told me she had to feel the pain she caused other people. She had teased another girl to tears on the playground, and the grown woman who had to feel that pain mocked the little girl for crying. The woman completely failed to learn empathy, and she’s terrified to die. The lesson here is obvious to me, but is completely non-understandable to her. Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing something as completely obvious in my life, because if I recognized it, then I might know what I’m supposed to be hurrying up and accomplishing.
When I was living in the woods, I took daily walks with my dog and examined the minutia of nature in a quiet, contemplative way that’s only possible when we don’t have any major responsibilities. I found a small field of violets and picked several million of them while my happy dog, who had even fewer responsibilities than me, slept in the puddle of sunshine. I made a lovely purple syrup out of the flowers which is high in vitamins A and C. It tasted wonderful. I bottled enough to last quite a while, but all good things come to an end, and eventually I needed more violets. My trusty dog and I went back to the violet field and discovered that the predominant plant in midsummer is poison ivy. Bummer. No more violet syrup, but the experience taught me that everything has its season. Everything happens in its own time. If I honor the seasons, I’ll never have to hurry.
Well, at least that’s the way of life when we’re in tune with nature, but people have an annoying habit of putting deadlines on things. Once, my boss gave me an impossible deadline and I snarled in exasperation, “All your deadlines are arbitrary!!” She actually laughed and admitted it was true. The deadline in question WAS entirely arbitrary. “Okay, get it finished by next week.” What?!?! I was torn between conflicting urges to hug her or kill her. Maybe if I’d only half-killed her she could’ve had her own interesting NDE, and possibly become more empathetic?
I doodled this art in pencil on notebook paper while watching TV. That seemed too lazy, but I lacked energy to actually get up for better supplies, so I doodled it bigger in ball point pen on another piece of notebook paper. Since I wrote about actually doing stuff and living my life’s mission, it just didn’t seem right to do such lazy art for this post. I scanned it in and fiddled a while in PhotoShop. Do you think I should’ve left well enough alone and just used the pencil version? Do you have an interesting NDE to share?
