What doesn't kill you, is trying to get your attention.
Sometimes calamity is the universe using extreme measures to try and get your attention.
We have all had a near miss of some kind. You can probably recall some past experience where calamity was 1/1000th of an inch away, but somehow was miraculously avoided.
You recall it…Everything going along fine, when all of a sudden, even before your consciousness registers what is happening, the film reel of this experience suddenly slows to 33 rpm. In that flash of an instant, you recognize something has changed but not sure yet what.
The unexpected emergence of slow motion is your red flag to WAKE UP, right before the surprise of whatever it is that caused your reality to slow. The change in your perception of time is a kind of alarm. An ‘ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS, INCOMING MISSILE. IMPACT IMMINENT’ warning.
You often come out of your stupor just in time to avoid whatever it is. The event passes and time returns to normal, then adrenaline bath begins. Your mouth turns dry and metallic with the rush of fight or flight chemicals now hitting your bloodstream.
Your heart races, vision narrows, your breathing switches to a shallow, ragged pace and your now sweaty hands shake as if you had thrown back one too many Celsius drinks in quick succession.
After the event, as things settle back to normal, you become hyper-vigilant. You’ve retreated from whatever dream state you were enjoying before the incident and are now planted firmly in the present, paying close attention to everything around you.
Is there meaning in this? Yes. Pay attention to what you are doing.
Is there a higher purpose in this run-of-the-mill near miss?
Probably not.
Sorry, you are not meant to avoid this one.
What happens if the near miss isn’t quite so clean? Is there a message or a lesson when death, dismemberment or mayhem is a higher outcome probability?
Perhaps. But, for some, calamities must be repeated and a single ordinary near miss simply doesn’t work. Is there meaning when multiple disasters unfold in relatively rapid succession. Sometime, change requires a bit more.
If you survive whatever thing you are not able to side step, it is probably in your best interest to pay attention to what the universe is trying to tell you.
The well-known podcaster Rich Roll openly talks about his descent into alcohol addiction. A former Stanford Division 1 swimmer, who later went on to get a law degree from Yale and pursued a life as a successful corporate attorney. From afar, things looked damn good for Rich. A life trajectory to be envied.
By his own account, his life wasn’t working. Perhaps somewhere he had made a wrong turn and ending up in the wrong reality. Somewhere along the line, he had been handed a script and didn’t realize it was the wrong plot line. Instead of opting out, like many he powered his way through the lines, borrowing a life meant for someone else until the universe, perhaps gave him a nudge.
I can’t speak for Rich. I don’t know him and have only communicated once with him and that was the exchange of only a single sentence in an Instagram DM. I can only observe on what he has shared publicly and apply my own point of view to that storyline.
I am using some of his story as an illustrative example.
Perhaps the universe’s initial nudge wasn’t enough. According to his own account, he first marriage ended before it even began. He gained 50 pounds, was consumed by stress and anxiety and devolved into self destructive alcoholic behaviors that without a shift in his reality, would have likely killed him.
He also suffered financial calamity among other challenges. If you would ask him, Rich would probably tell you that during this time his worst fears came true. Instead of repeating this behavior, he chose to find a new home and place. Rich got back on the thoroughfare to find the right exit for his life and a new reality. Which he did. He deserves my sincerest kudos for the courage to decide to change the 5% of his life that was anchoring him in the wrong place.
I would posit that if asked, these few years and the experiences he had to go through were supremely hard but were required for a transition to something entirely new. He went through something supremely hard and didn’t die.
Rich went on to become an ultra-endurance athlete later in life, wrote several best selling books, including ‘Finding Ultra’. Today, he interviews some of the most influential and creative minds alive on the planet today. People who either have always lived in the right reality but more that have left one to find another. Several guests come to mind including Ken Rideout, Zach Bush, Mel Robbins, Harvey Lewis, Anna Lembke, Michael O’Brien, and David Goggins just to name a few.
This is the Universe calling. Will you accept the charges?
What doesn’t kill you is trying to get your attention. Your higher self, the Universe, Source Energy, your stored potential. Use whichever label you like.
When this happens and you decide to wake up and throw aside the 5% of your life that is anchoring you in place, your journey to a new reality or life experience has begun.
Misogi as defined by some, including Michael Easter, Author of ‘The Comfort Crisis’ as ‘Do something incredibly hard, where there is a greater chance of failure than success. And don’t die in the process (literally or figuratively). Just do it. Don’t promote it while you are doing it either. A Misogi isn’t a flex curated for Instagram or Tik Tok. They are intensely personal.
The end is near. But it isn’t what you think.
2018 was a rough year. The tech business I was running was filled with never ending turbulence. Not the normal light chop of business mind you. This was the never ending roller coaster experience in which you look side eye at your spouse and grip the arm rest, praying you don’t have to kiss your ass goodbye sometime soon.
I was exhausted, physically, emotionally and spiritually drained. My life choices at this time simply were not working.
On an almost daily basis, I kept asking to no one in particular, “WHY IS THIS SO FUCKING HARD?!” The difficulty was the universe whispering, ‘pick a different direction.’ I ignored the whisper. The many signs hidden in plain sight, as many of us often do.
The spring of that year, I decided to go to my cycling team’s training camp that straddled the border of North and South Carolina. We stayed near Hotel Domestique run by a former pro, George Hincapie. Our team does several training camps a year and I had been to this particular one two years prior. It had been hard but rejuvenating. A small adventure, physical and mental well-being repair packed into three and a half days.
I chose to drive solo to camp that year. I removed the top from my Jeep and decided to enjoy the drive and be as present as I could. I had prepped everyone at work the best I could for my one and a half day absence from the office. Again, boundaries be damned, the drama followed me.
I would rise early at camp, the usual 3:14am wake time that plagued me daily had followed me to North Carolina. I would follow the same early morning routine of stressing and obsessing about disaster while lying in bed. By 6:30 team members and our nutritionist were milling about. The nutritionist making breakfast, everyone else lounging about enjoying coffee. Me, I was in the corner on my laptop or outside on the phone. I would rush to get ready for the ride, always the last one out. My heart racing before we were even out of the driveway.
By day three I was strung out. Mentally and physically I was worse off than when I arrived. Trying to keep up with the torrid pace the team was laying down was taking its toll along with juggling the chaos from home. Trying to keep the anxiety and panic attacks and doom thinking at bay, after my evening conference calls, I over indulged before falling into bed by midnight. By day three something had to give. And it did.
After a brutal several mile climb covering several thousand feet of elevation, I was spent but refused to be the last one up to the summit and achieved that goal, but only through supreme effort and cost. I had burned every last one of my matches and was spent by the time I reached the summit. Due to all the stress and too many bad habits to cope with that stress, I was woefully out of shape or prepared for camp.
On the way down the mountain, my danger sensors were on the fritz. After about a mile of rapid descent I laid into a 50 degree blind turn. I underestimated the severity of the turn and my speed and angle going into it. I overcooked the corner and realized I was going way, way too fast. Without rapidly slowing, I would crash into the barrier, go flying over it and down the rocky, pine tree laced cliff.
In less than five seconds, I did everything possible to scrub speed without losing too much control and make the turn. It appeared it was going to work.
I had slowed to somewhere just south of 30mph, my tires literally skipping sideways across the pavement as I leaned into the turn with everything I had, using every trick I knew, as if my life depended on it—because it did.
Back off the saddle to put weight over the rear wheel, pressing down hard on the outside pedal and pressing equally hard on the inside handlebar, chest and head low to get the center of gravity down. Some old mountain bike tricks thankfully ingrained into my muscle memory.
At the turn’s apex, I felt my left pedal scrape the barrier as I screamed down the hill, in the wrong lane. “Keep turning, keep scrubbing speed.” I thought. Then another flashed into my mind. “You. Are. Going. To. Make. It. Thank you God.”
All of this happened in less than 8 seconds. Then I looked up and the last memory to imprint was the green paint of the hood, the large silver grill and blue Ford name badge of the F150 headed up the hill at the same speed I was heading down, which happened to now be less than 5 feet in front of me somehow. We met with each of us going close to 30. In the opposite direction, of course.
How I didn’t die, I will never know. I should have. Things inside, all on my right side were broken as well as a severe concussion. Thankfully, no fractured skull. Thank you POC Sports.
There was a lot of soft tissue damage as well. I have some photos of this taken in the aftermath. If we ever meet, I will show them to you. For any cyclist that has had a severe crash, you know for your road rash to stick to your clothes or sheets. Not a pleasant experience.
I should have hit the truck on my left side, but all the damage was all on my right. How this came to be, I still don’t know. Neither does the driver of the pickup, who later when we connected over the phone told me he had aged a decade in that few seconds. For that, I am profoundly sorry. He had done nothing wrong.
He explained on one of our post accident insurance discussion calls he had killed a deer with an unexpected and violent impact and that had shaken him to the core only a few weeks earlier. Killing a person? he had said, that would have been something he could not have easily lived with.
Eventually, things healed, insurance claims settled and I’m sure I faded into the driver’s distant memory, as much a dream by now as anything else.
I didn’t know it yet at the time, but that experience was the first leg of my own series of Misogi challenges in which my own reality began to shift. No, I didn’t die, nor did I somehow miraculously avoid that accident.
Instead, by having the accident, I was knocked out of my old orbit and began a journey that would take me in an entirely different direction, both literally and figuratively.
Looking back, I now see the subtle irony in how the universe works. I have more than a few examples, including this one. A few years later, I found myself in the exact same spot as the accident, racing the BWR Asheville, a challenging gravel bike race traversing the mountains of North and South Carolina.
Some of that course overlapped the training camp road bike route where the accident occurred. This time, I was in the midst of my own re-emergence into a new reality, strongly competing in a new sport, gravel cycling that was a close cousin to the road racing I had previously done. The BWR offered me a unique challenge, which I was now equipped to conquer that would have been impossible before.
During the period in between my two visits to the area I experienced my own continued slide downward. I gained my own 50 pounds in the process. It was only through a series of unexpected events in between the accident and BWR which part of my Misogi journey that I found myself back in North Carolina on the heels of COVID only a few later. This time equipped very differently.
The irony of the two experiences linked to that common place was not lost on me. What I have learned from this is most of what we perceive isn’t exactly as it seems and what we fear and believe to be true often isn’t. Knowing this is powerful.
We all have things we fret over and worry about. We all have things we are terrified, that if they were to come to being, our lives would implode.
What I have learned over the last few years of my journey, in which my accident was the first catalyst to put my journey towards a new set of life experiences-a new reality- into motion, is that our worst fears are often nothing more than Ghost Stories.
The demons we believe deliver those fears, our harbingers of doom, standing on the other side of the door knocking for us are often mistaken. They are not demons but instead the angles of change here to save us from the pain and shortcomings found in a mistakenly selected life.
While the labels on your worst fears might appear to be dreadful, don’t be afraid to open the door and let the angels you find on the other side lead you on your own Misogi adventure.
If this story resonates, then begin the process choosing another path. You will not not regret it.
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