What Really Matters

Well, after four months I’m still getting better! Surprise huh? No matter what I think or feel about it all, I’m continuing to heal. I’m truly recovering from almost dying three times, breaking my back, losing an eye and an ear, and whacking my brain so hard it’s never really clear. Yet as a whole person, not just the sum of my injuries, I have been able to stay relatively positive and optimistic so far. I think that has to have some effect on my recovery. The doctors say I can’t speed up the recovery time but there are lots of things I can do to slow it down, i.e., depression, anger, resentment, etc.

I’ve found as I continue with the healing process, that it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate what really matters from lots of seemingly urgent tasks and desires that arise daily.

I’ve been reflecting on what I did before the accident. I certainly thought of myself as someone who continually weighs the importance, or frivolousness, of things throughout the days and months and years. Now I believe that many of my choices were driven by my personal desires for myself, as well as my desires for others. It is very difficult to just strip things back to what really matters, putting aside my personal views, thoughts, opinions and preferences…even if I think it is the ‘right’ thing to do.

For example, if my family really wants to go to the beach this morning, and I for a bike ride, what really matters? I need the bike ride sometimes to be with the family in a clear way, and yet, if I knew I would get hit by a car and barely survive, impact my family for years to come, would I still choose to go? Probably not. No question they really matter most. It’s just hard to juggle our desires and perceived needs over what really matters in the end, especially when we don’t know what that will be.

I now wonder, with the brush of death, and the appreciation of life, so close, how I would choose the many paths I have taken again. That is the beauty of living I suppose, and of growing, yet wouldn’t it be wonderful to dig deep within each time we choose, being able to decipher ‘what really matters’ from what we ‘think matters’ at the time, in the circumstances we face.

I find myself faced with disabilities that I must cope with daily. I don’t always have the luxury of acting on my desires or wishes. The difference is that I’m not sure any of those desires and wishes I have are all that important to my life when it comes right down to it. Participating in risky sports, or close calls driving, etc., sometimes made me feel important as I lived through them, but I’m not convinced they were all that important to my life as far as the value they truly brought me, beyond pleasure.

I am shocked, after my accident, for example, by all the drug use in our communities (not that I wasn’t before!) not because of my sense of right and wrong so much as my new sense of ‘what really matters’. With all the dangerous, unhealthy, violent and risky things we can participate in, why make it harder and worse by doing consciously bad things to ourselves like drugs. Maybe many of those people aren’t conscious, but I wonder.

In a moment my life was changed. In future moments I can keep changing it for the better, and why not keep on changing it? I don’t know where the Auto/Stop button gets pushed. Maybe when we get so busy we can hardly manage it all? Maybe when we just loose the energy to care. All I know now is that I must hold on to all or part of this appreciation for life and the choices I have to live it.

What really matters to me now is that I fully participate in a life I am lucky to have, and to cherish and treat it as my last each and every day. Sounds preachy I know (besides, I had a brain injury!) but how many of us can stay focused with so much going on? How many of us can still see, deep and clear, what really matters?

Hope you are all listening. Hope you will eek out the time to send me a quick note about what you think, about it all!

Choices to ya!

Mark

Comments

[Bob K.]

Mark,

I spend much of my life wondering about just these things, "What matters"? What's the point of life if it's not to "matter"?

To be brief: I don't have the answers. I am finding some things that I live by that seem to help keep things clearer. One is that buying and having things takes me further away from what matters. It removes me from my real life, in that you spend so much mental time thinking about what to buy, should I buy, when to buy, etc. Plus there is the drag of ownership, the guilt of being an uber-consumer in an already over-fed country. (I also believe there is a kind of bad psychic weight in ownership that is proportionate to the size of the purchase - an anchor made of materialism - and our houses may be the largest of them all). Plus of course the mere fact that you have to earn the money to buy things, which in my life, takes me completely out of my *life*. The clarity in my life doesn't come from burning up my time in order to be able to buy things.

The other is that helping people matters. I can't say it's always clarifying and good, but in the end, it is always right. There are times when I've over-committed myself to volunteer activities, helping friends, just being a friend and family member over taking care of myself. And in the end, somehow there is a rightness about it. It feels more right than if I'd just taken care of myself. I may be exhausted - and often am - but the results are always, for lack of a better word, right.

Just my little life piece.

Bob