March 28, 2016

In one of my last journal entries from the Camino I talked about my first encounter with infinity, 5 years old, lying in the bathtub, steam on the square blue tiles, my mind traveling to the deepest reaches of space and time and being overwhelmed, frightened and exhilarated. It's a feeling I've kept with me all my life. Around that time I was also absorbing information like a sponge. I had learned to read very early, and my mother provided me with countless books on the objective world, on animals and insects, trucks and trains, geology and the solar system and the universe. Between my somewhat mystical encounter in the bathtub and my nonstop reading, I became hyper aware of the vastness of time and space and how tiny a speck each one of us is in the big picture, and how brief our lives are on the great timeline of existence. I pictured, as I still do, my life as a tiny segment on an endless line, and whether I lived 50 years or 75 or 100, it was all just a tiny moment, with eons of time before me and after me. I guess what I'm saying is that I became deeply aware of the notion of mortality and the brevity of our individual lives at a very early age. Interestingly it didn't bother me much. I innocently accepted it as another piece in the giant puzzle of life.

Though I couldn't have articulated it as a kid, I think my realization that life is brief, accentuated by the fact that three of my grandparents died before I turned 10, became some kind of motivation for me. Around first grade or so I started to feel what would become lifelong wanderlust. I had started to collect stamps, and I was entranced by images from India, Afghanistan, French Guiana and all places exotic; I could practically feel and smell the dugout canoes and the desert oases and the odd temples the images depicted. As soon as I would acquire a new stamp I'd run to the encyclopedia and read about the country and its people and architecture, and damn, I wanted to go everywhere! And there was urgency. If life was indeed short and fleeting I had better get moving! I remember in late elementary school when people would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up I would say I wanted to see the world.

And I've been so lucky in life. As many of you know, between work and other adventures I've been to Europe and Asia something like 80 times, countless times around the States, and I still can't get enough.

Of course as we get older the notion of our own mortality becomes less theoretical and much more real and present and visceral. Parents die, friends die, relatives die, colleagues die. Each time it's a shock but each time we pick ourselves up and go on. In fact for me it acts as an even greater motivator to get out there and seize the day.

Which all brings me to what I've been going through recently. 2015 was a peak year for me. I felt strong, robust, inspired, creative, free, and passionately in love with life, perhaps more powerfully than I've ever felt. Walking the Camino was one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences of my life, and the physical and mental high lasted many months after I returned home. But 2016 has gotten off to a pretty rotten start.

In early January a growth on my scalp that the dermatologists had been watching turned to pre-melanoma, so I had a rather large section excised. When folks saw the 45 stitches across my head, the most commonly used word was "Frankenstein". Then in February I threw my back out the worst in 20 years. Couldn't get out of bed except to go to the bathroom for over two weeks, addled with pain and meds. And then when I finally started to walk again I started to feel chest pressure and pain. And then two weeks ago I had a heart attack.

I've been anxious about heart disease for a long time because my family history is almost as bad as it gets. Both of my parents had heart attacks in their 50s and my younger brother had a massive heart attack at 52. About thirty years ago, when a doc was taking my history, I was told that it was not a matter of if, but when, I would develop heart disease. I cleaned up my diet and have exercised regularly ever since, but there's no fighting genetics.

Fortunately they're calling it a minor heart attack, and the prognosis is good. One artery was 90+% blocked--now stented--but the others are generally ok. Long term damage should be minimal; the cardiologist said that with my exercise and diet regimen my heart was very strong and that it should repair itself. It's going to take a while to build myself back up, especially since I've been unable to do much exercise since the beginning of the year, but the docs say I should eventually be walking across countries again.

In fact the struggle may be as much psychological as physical. Apparently I walked 500 miles across Spain with a 25 pound pack on my back with a severely occluded artery, but I had no idea. Funny thing is, I probably felt as good physically as I ever have, youth included. I was extremely lucky, though, that I had the attack at home and not on some remote mountain pass in Galicia. So as much as I'll have to build myself up physically I've got some head work to do as well. I'm as determined as ever to have challenging adventures, but there's a greater fear factor now as well.

Thing is, though, while lying in the cardio ward last week, I realized I'm pretty ok with dying. I've lived an incredibly lucky and rich life, blessed with people I love deeply and who love me, and I've seen and done way more than one guy could ever expect to. I'd feel bad about the sadness and emptiness I might cause to those who love me, but I feel like personally I've had my fair share.

That said, I ain't done yet. Hopefully I've got a whole lot of gallivanting around the world yet to go. We're going to have to cancel our walk in Italy this spring, but hopefully it won't be long before I'm once again out there drinking in this wild, crazy, sad, wonderful world.

I feel ambivalent about posting about illness, but I hope my friends and family will see this not as a plea for sympathy or prayers, which was not the motivation for writing this piece, but as an attempt to articulate what my recent experience has been. The examined life, so to speak.