Certainty in a Very Uncertain World

BROCK

PART 1 – CALM BEFORE THE STORM

What is distraction?

One evening while staying at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Hong Kong and enjoying a fine Monte Christo cigar and an equally fine glass of Verve Clicquot champagne with my boss, I received a real shock. I wasn’t merely surprised, I was really shocked. The true impact of what I was about to hear, however, wouldn’t hit me until a number of years later when the other shoe fell.

The first ‘shoe’ falling is when we gain knowledge of something, the second shoe falling is when we understand what we know.

He said, out of the blue I feel like the emptiest man in the world

This was a person earning about a million dollars a year, happily married with two great kids; a man, seemingly, absolutely at the top of his ‘game’. What was he talking about? Why would he be running on empty?

Evidently, appearances can be deceiving.

In his pursuit of ‘success’, he had become distracted from the main game. I was so likewise distracted, though, that I couldn’t help him. He had already arrived where I was heading.

What is the main game?

Simply, everything I have bought or can buy is replaceable but everything I got for free is irreplaceable. Valuing and looking after the ‘free’ stuff is the main game.

What I was seeing for the first time and would later come to understand is that the saddest person in the world is not the ‘down and out’, it’s the up and out. The person who has it all and is not happy. The down and out has hope, it may be the futile kind like when I win the lottery but it is still hope of the ‘perfect’ future. The up and out has discovered that you can’t draw life from dead ‘matter’ regardless of how glossy it is. Only living people can give you life.

Truth is, if you neglect the free stuff to pursue the purchase-able stuff, you are distracted from the main game and run the risk, through neglect, of losing the truly valuable things (people + relationships, health, etc.)

Not for one moment am I suggesting less is better but, and this is a really big but, there has to be balance.

One man I know had planned a trip to Disney World for the family. On the scheduled day of departure, his family was packed and ready to go, waiting for him to come home from the office and pick them up. He instead called from the airport to tell them that he had to go to Singapore on a vitally important business trip.

What message did that send to his family?

You really have to be distracted to miss one that big but I saw it happen regularly and was a participant in the same kind of insanity.

Over the coming chapters I am going to describe the relationship between specific out of control situations in my life, caused by distractions, and the movement of the ‘steering wheel’ that guided me and my family safely out of each. In these cases, the gentle ‘correction’ was a softly spoken word, not to be heard with external ears but heard just as surely. Not passive thoughts but powerful, encouraging, spoken words.

When we think, we actually own the thought because it originates with us. That’s one kind of thought and in it I refer to my self as me and I. Another kind of thought comes to me as you; that’s not me, I don’t call me YOU. It didn’t originate with me but my ‘antennae’ picked it up. These can sometimes be quite destructive like you’re an idiot and there’s no hope for you. We’ve all had them.

What I’m talking about is something entirely different to those general kinds of thoughts. As different as good advice for a particular situation is from reading a horoscope – twelve sizes fits all (seven billion of us) give me a break!

I’ll give you an example.

In the next chapter, I cover the distraction that led to me having eight heart attacks. Some months before the first, as I was waking up one morning, I distinctly heard these words, spoken to me

Time is so short.

This was not what I was thinking at the time, I was thinking about breakfast and we can only hold one thought at a time, thank God. No, this was quite separate from me and it wasn’t passive. I knew exactly what was being spoken about and the urgent need for me to do something about it. It was powerful; that is, it contained the raw energy/power to do it, if I so willed. So I did.

There is, in fact, no force more powerful in the world than words. They start and end wars; they create and destroy relationships and they can even motivate entire nations.

John F Kennedy, President of the United States, once observed that he couldn’t ‘manage’ the nation through personal effort, it was just too big – 50 states and 200 million plus people. He knew instead that he had to motivate it with powerful, inspiring words. In his inaugural speech, he spoke a sentence that resonated with his entire nation and for a time galvanised it into action with new hope. He said:

Ask not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country.

All great leaders, people like Winston Churchill, have understood that. His words held Britain together in her darkest hour.

So, the power attribute of what I heard that morning was both distinctive and important. Distinctive because ‘thoughts’ rarely carry that much power; that’s why we back them up with some imaginary power like a New Years resolution. Important because, without real power, our best intentions will never see the light of day.

While I would still have to contend with some of the consequences of the damage done to my coronary arteries to that point, I have no doubt the result would have been very much worse had I not heeded and used the warning (drawing power from those words). It had to do with something that I had wrestled unsuccessfully with for some time.

Then, just days before a heart attack struck, while walking through Town Hall station in Sydney, thinking, incidentally, about what flavour of NZ ice cream I was going to buy, I clearly heard you’re going to make it.

When the heart attack came several days later, I remained quite relaxed, if that’s possible, while everyone around me was panicking, and these people were hospital staff.

Why was I so calm? Because I had already been told that I was going to make it. Now that’s some kind of power. When it was spoken, I had no specific idea what was meant. But when the heart attacks hit, every one of them, that word spoke up inside me each time. You’re going to make it!

Do I go around listening for voices. Certainly not! That will either disappoint you or send you nuts.

Read on.

Distraction = loss of control

Loss of control comes in many forms. Financially it can be someone making a decision to bankrupt you. Physically, a heart attack will do it every time. Children ignoring your advice can leave you feeling powerless, especially when you see them heading for a disaster. A spouse/partner no longer having respect for you and not wanting to continue the relationship would be, I imagine, hard to top.

At one time or another, over the past seventeen years, I have experienced pretty much the entire gamut of out of control situations, many as potentially lethal as the two car events.

Having been a long distance runner in my twenties and thirties, running up to 120 kilometres a week, my decision to take up smoking between the ages of 45 and 50 is pretty hard to fathom. Starting with the occasional cigar (one won’t hurt, will it?) I ‘progressed’ in a downward spiral to 50 cigarettes a day (and night, at any time in the middle of the night).

As a psychologist acquaintance of mine is fond of asking: what could he have been thinking?

Where did I think that little distraction would lead? Certainly not the eight heart attacks I had – with ten stents and a set of steak knives thrown in with each.

What the medicos are mystified by, however, is the fact that I have only a tiny area of sluggish heart function. They routinely describe it as a ‘miracle’. People in my situation have typically had a heart replacement or died.

Smoking and a lifetime of too much sugar had clogged every one of my major cardiac arteries to a factor of between 70% and 90+%, hence the need, over time, for 10 stents. A stent is a titanium ‘frame’ that is inserted into an artery to expand it and restore blood flow.

After the heart attack I had in 2010, I accelerated my preventative regime – diet and exercise, but, nobody but me can really explain the lack of damage to + recovery of the heart muscle itself.

In 2012, I had a nuclear stress test that revealed the excellent level of heart function and overall aerobic capacity that I had.

What I am telling you is verifiable. I am not trying to get you to accept a way out theory. I am telling you about specific circumstances whose outcomes defy ‘logic’ and conventional wisdom.

But, in spite of this, my coronary issues were not over. However, on January 9th, 2016, I had another heart attack, this one potentially the deadliest due to a cardiologist’s mistake. The next day I had another angiogram to determine the reason for the heart attack. It was quickly discovered that in my right artery in which there were three stents, the one on the middle was completely blocked. The cardiologist decided to unblock it by inserting a probe through my wrist, up my arm and into my chest cavity; attached to the probe was a balloon. It was his intention to navigate his way through the first stent to the second where he would inflate the balloon in the second to dislodge the clot blocking it and stopping the blood flow to my heart.

At all times, I was fully conscious and watching the action on a massive screen in the angio lab situated beside the operating table. At one point, I distinctly heard the words spoken to me: Sharpen up, your life is in danger! About 90 seconds later, I saw on the screen what I believed was the balloon inflating. When I asked the doctor if this was the case, he replied fearfully: No, that’s blood, I’ve just torn your artery

Turned out, he had not only torn my artery but also my aorta and I