This heart of mine, wish I was talking metaphorically but I’m not, is acting up again. It nearly knocked me to the ground yesterday … and I was sitting in my comfy chair reading. It’s probably not deadly. Odds are the defibrillator in my chest will stop its wild antics before lack of blood causes me to die. At least it gets six tries before the device stops and lets life or death do what it will.

I’ve experienced three in a row once. I think I’d rather die than go six rounds. 

My heart’s rather large hiccups come without warning, like all of life’s plot twists. I was sitting here enjoying my afternoon, finishing up a chapter before I headed across the way to my neighbor’s for dinner, and the pacemaker started pacing the bottom chamber of my rambunctious heart. Oops! I was in ventricular tachycardia again.

When it happens, it feels a lot like being held under water, unable to take a breath. I, quite naturally, wait for the blast – the defibrillator kick — the big one. Last night it didn’t get that far. The lower chamber pacing stopped the v-tach and rather than the device blowing me apart cellularly, the event just left me wobbly enough that ideas of dinner with friends dropped like the hot potato they delivered a bit later.

Nearly twenty-four hours later, I’m still wobbly and very aware – exclamation points aware – that I have no control. Love the way life adds exclamation points to lessons! Not quite three years ago, I was in perfect health and honestly expected to live in health, uneventfully for another 35 years. Longevity runs in the family. Now it’s all up in the air. Of course, it always was. There are no guarantees here. Life gives us what it does and doesn’t seem to buy into our wishes and desires, hopes and prayers, not even our genetics.

It is fun (I know … fun to me) to watch the mind after an event. After it realizes death has been averted, or at least momentarily delayed, it begins to try to figure out what I did that caused this brush with mortality. What did I eat? What was my energy like? Was I stressed? Did I overdo? Did I eat too much salt? It goes round and round trying to put a reason on the unreasonable, to place blame so it can get a good night’s sleep. If it can find the reason — any reason will do, even a purely innocent, blameless reason — then life isn’t out of control.  

Minds do that. They take their ‘protect and defend’ jobs very seriously. It’s the ultimate in policing only they aren’t defending anything worth saving. They are defending the illusion of control. It’s kind of hilarious to watch the show, to see the insanity and let it run wild without watching as a someone who cares, let alone a someone. There is no reason to care because trying to figure it out doesn’t change a thing. It just drives you crazy, spiraling down and down into embodied belief in a stand-alone being, alone being the key word.

Crazy is the belief that I of myself am, that I am individualized beingness distinct from infinite being. If I am my own discreet being, then it’s impossible for infinite being to be. Infinite would include all of it, or it wouldn’t be infinite. In any scenario that paints me as a distinct being, I am on my own, and ideas of God or any infinite being, can go pound sand.  

Rubbish.

Mind is all about protecting the insanity, defending the crazy. I actually do quite well without a mind, without listening to it rag on life, without buying in to its elaborate blame game. It’s truly endearing to watch it work its wiles, to see how desperate it is to maintain its allure, to watch as it does what it believes to be its sacred duty. The fragmented chaos reminds me of a narcissistic lover who just realized that his old charm no longer works and is grasping for anything to suffer the blame but there is no one handy, nothing believable to be sacrificed.     

What if there is no reason? What if life simply is what it is and not only can’t be, but need not be, fixed? What if you will do what you will do without all the mental autoeroticism? What if all that thought stimulation is self-abuse? What if it does no good at all, and rather than good, causes harm?

Maybe you don’t have control after all? I know that’s blasphemy in this material world. A few come close, but keep some tidy exceptions tucked away, interpretations that maintain breathing room, that create a little leeway. Are you willing to step over the line into zilch nada nil? Are you willing to live in ‘what if’? If I’m wrong, you have nothing to lose. What’s the harm in experimenting? ‘What If’ is a good place to live. What do you really know anyway? Are you willing to find out?