I am tired of waiting.

I am not scared of dying. I used to be. But I am not anymore.

The thought of dying was as if everything had being taken away from me at some unexpected point, not on my terms and completely out of my control. The idea was unnerving. It was a summons to attend the final command performance regardless of what I was doing. Then there was all the uncertainty of what might or might not happen afterwards. Whoa. Too much. Scary. Ignore it and pretend it isn’t there.

Yet this is exactly what happened to me on May 28th, 2024 at 4:43pm. But these words are not about that day or those events.

What I learned after getting hit was that everything I believed about dying, and living for that matter, was not true.

In fact, I have come to realize that for most of my time in this place, here in this construct that we call life, I have been as scared to live as I have been to die.

Let that sink in for a moment and then ask yourself that question.

Are you as scared of living as you are of dying?

I believe most of us are.

Like me, you are going to die. That is a certainty. However, unlike me, you may not get a preview of exactly what that looks, feels, smells and sounds like.

Just know that ‘there’ is as real as ‘here’. It is likely that ‘there’ is exactly what you might hope for, but completely unlike what you might expect.

Oh, and the distance between ‘there’ and ‘here’ is not as far as you think, so don’t spend an iota of time fretting about it because I purposely mis-spoke above.

You can pre-view ‘there’ or the place and experiences of the other side, or at least some of it ‘here’.

Hi, my name is Steve. I am your tour guide. I will explain as we go.

The wonder and beauty, love, compassion, awe, peace and most importantly, the profound level of understanding that greets you when you arrive ‘there’ bleed over into this reality too, if you can find it, that is. Like I said, the distance between ‘there’ and ‘here’ is not that far. They overlap. For real.

This is not my assessment, rather it was a fact that was shared with me from someone from ‘there’.

This piece is not to talk about not being scared of dying or the ‘there’ and ‘here’ thing. We will save that for later.

Rather the purpose of these words is about not being scared of living.

Are you scared of living?

Having come through what I went through, I have spent more than a little time ruminating on the concept of living and what that entails as well as that does or doesn’t mean.

I spent a large portion of my life existing inside a script I didn’t write, but did freely accept. It was a script I was neither particularly good at, nor liked very much. Instead, I existed within a part. A character’s role within that script if you will.

I know lots of people who fit this description and compensation their frustration and waiting with drugs and other bad habits.

On the surface, they are successful.On the surface everything looks fine. A fresh coat of paint looks good but underneath the wood is rotted. Any pressure and it collapses.

That is how it works.

I played that part and the script unfolded out along a predictable storyline mostly one of several you could probably identify having seen, read about in a book, on TV or in a movie. The plot lines of mundane and shallow events are rather consistent and predictable.

Through all of it, I was not living but instead going through the motions outlined in the script. Most of all, I was…waiting.

And to this day, most of the time, I would say that I am still not really living in any consistent way. I still find myself waiting way too often.

Part of why I wait is I need to deal with the collateral damage of the accident. The TBI is the gift that keeps on giving. As I write this, I am in a TBI low spot. Things are harder than they were in September for some reason. I have to work harder just to stay even right now.. It was a hit and run so there is no criminal. No certainty. No closure. Still, it is what it is. Right now is not forever. Keep that in mind.

Right now is not forever.

Since my accident and, as of today, I have asked 187 people, some of them complete strangers two simple questions.

Why? No idea. Let me restate that. No idea yet. The purpose and knowledge will come in due course.

The first question I ask is , ‘What is the hardest thing you have ever done?’ and the second is, ‘what did that hard thing teach you?’

Twelve percent of the people who’ve answered my questions have truly done hard things.

Some of them were heart wrenching. Like the man who told me about the argument he had with his wife and daughter about a first date one morning before school.

Seventh grade was too young to go to a movie with a boy. His wife said it was fine. He was inflexible and rather than talk about it he said, you just need to take her to school. No date. And to make his point, he said, “You can go over my dead body.” On the way to school and likely distracted by the argument, his wife and daughter were hit by a dump truck running a red light and were both killed.

Yeah. That is hard.

But with tears streaming down his cheeks, while talking to me, a total stranger while standing in a food line in an airport he shared that his hardest thing was allowing himself to begin living again after that terrible day.

There was another. Overcoming late stage breast cancer. And another, amputation. A few more. Bankruptcy and then homelessness. Severe drug addiction. Park Avenue to Park Bench alcoholism. There were also things like climbing and nearly freezing on K2, swimming the English Channel (no joke) and even completing the Leadville 100 (run).

These people opened up and told me the answer to an odd and unexpected question. They told the truth with courage and authenticity. They were true to who they really were by responding in the way they did rather than saying something….safer.

The other 88% had not really done anything monumentally difficult or experienced any real hardship in which the outcome including the discovery of what they were or were not made of was entirely uncertain.

Why does this matter? Because it is my opinion that the 88% are experiencing the pain of waiting but have no clue that is what they are doing. They have not woken up yet.

Now, I only count the people who were willing to answer. There have been another 34 who’ve ignored me, walked away, told me to fuck off or even scoffed at asking such a stupid question to someone they don’t know.

But for those who answered and who had survived truly hard things, there was two common themes in what they shared. So I share them now with you.

One. These individuals had to sustain severe mental and physical or mental and emotional pain for an extended period of time along with the very real possibility they would wither under the pressure of the experience.

In essence, they believed with their entire being at some point that they were less than the experience or obstacle which they faced. An obstacle that demanded something from them in order for them to pass.

In each of these experiences, all of them said that more than once during the experience, they actually gave up. They didn’t think about giving up. They actually did. They quit momentarily. They folded.

But just as quick, something pulled them to their feet. They found some inner strength, or courage. some resolve and they restarted and then eventually persevered.

In this process, they became enlightened because they also believed almost universally, this strength, belief came from somewhere outside themselves. Call it God, faith, spirituality, providence, the universe, spirit guide, angels, their grand-pop watching over them, whatever. The label doesn’t matter.

Each of them through this process began to understand the barriers which contained them were not what they were taught to believe.

And at some moment in time, can’t became a word they chose to leave to others.

Two. They were no longer scared. Scared of anything really. They saw the world differently. They saw truth. And the reality of truth is different.

I’ve asked myself that question.

What is the hardest thing you have ever done? The answer I came up with months ago was surely correct.

Right? No, my original answer was wrong. It wasn’t the coming back from the accident as was my snap response.

Instead it was coming back from a life ending belief that my best days were behind me. This had occurred two years prior to the accident.

I had believed that catastrophic business failure was the terminus point from which there was only sideways motion and that was if I was lucky and I did not believe I was lucky. For months, that is the way I existed. Bad behaviors and bad attitude, living in a low energy, self-wallowing victim-based tar pit of an existence. This is a place more people than should inhabit.

Breaking free of that place was the hardest thing I have ever done.

From that to the time of the accident and even afterwards including recently, I’ve had flashes of really living but that was interrupted by longer stretches of….reverting to waiting.

I realized recently this is exactly what a lot of us do here in this life, we hit some headwinds, things slow down, they get a little bit challenging and we wait. We wait for what’s next. For things to get better. We wait for the next meeting, the next day, the next vacation. For a raise, a promotion, a new client. We wait for the next shoe to drop.

We wait until the waiting is over and we are called to the command performance. I did this lying in that ditch after getting hit. I still had things to do. Why the fuck had I spent so much time waiting? For a moment, regret wasn’t just an emotion, it was everything. It took on a solid form. Every cell in my body was laced with regret. Still I was lying there dying. It was too late.

Then I was given a second chance.

At that point, I had not remembered the NDE. That would come later. All I knew is I had wasted so much time waiting.

But what why was I waiting and what for?

Having endured some hard things myself, I am not scared. Today, I accept unknown and uncertainty without any real fear or panic. So what’s the issue? Why am I not really living? I don’t think I am scared. So what gives?

I don’t really know how. Habit holds me back from living a life made up entirely of my authentic being. Still, I have a few Aces up my sleeve to help me bridge the gap and kill the existing habits.

Here is the thing. I believe that many of us (like the 88%) find ourselves unfulfilled or unsatisfied. We exist, we wait. Life is bumpy and boring. It happens to us. Our life and our existence is thrust upon us, as if we are handed a script and told to play the role. So, we sigh and do what we are told.

For the 12% we recognize what we’ve been conditioned to believe is a mirage. A self-perpetuated, sustained lie.

Some of us understand this because we have seen beyond it. Still, are we living or mostly living? For the really living to occur, I believe we a roadmap and a collective of engaged, like minded souls to help us break the habit of waiting. Connection and understanding will allow those of us who wish to stop waiting to break free of its gravitational force, which is significant.

To do this alone is well…I believe is nearly impossible. Not but nearly.

The current chapter we all find ourselves in, no matter how deep in the book we are, (20 years or 70), isn’t really the last chapter as is reported.

Instead it is the first, if you are willing to stop waiting and start living authentically and help build and participate in the collective. The support network of higher energy that can bind us and carry us beyond the bounds of waiting’s gravity. That’s one of the necessary ingredients I believe.

You see, perhaps that is why I got off the couch that day in October two years ago and why I did not die that day this past May. Just perhaps all the chapters in my script to date were simply a prologue to help end all the waiting.

I believe we have a collective to build, new habits to embrace, relationships to explore and chapters to write in which there is no more waiting.

What do you think? Is waiting time over?