For most, if not all of my life, I have embraced the short view of things. I am a live-in-the-moment human, the prince of now. Tomorrow is eeons away for me, waiting a week is akin to torture, my faith has always been impatience, intolerance and frustration. If anything can save me, it is that I am open to change, and life has beaten the short view out of me lately, and helped me see, or perhaps stunned me into understanding the long view of life. Or life.

Many people are stunned, even outraged,  when their dogs and cats die, when their mothers and fathers die, when they get old and sick, when their flowers fade, when storms come. Like me, they embrace the short view of life, the great spiritualists all know better, they are never surprised by life, they embrace every bit of it, the light always follows the darkness.

I am in my sixth decade to begin with, and there is much more time behind me than ahead of me, sometimes that makes me practice the short view of life even more. On one of the creative groups I help administer, eruptions of rebelliousness, politicking and angst sometimes erupt – the long view understands that this will happen whenever more than two human beings gather to try and accomplish anything – but I literally can’t bear it, my mind screams out to me: “you don’t have time for this, life is too short for this, you cannot afford to waste a single moment on this, get to work.”

I think my open heart surgery has challenged my short view of life, much like a bomb challenges the tree it falls on. You walk around in a post-surgical stupor, wondering just what the hell happened to your body and your life, there is smoke and debris everywhere, and you feel confused and disoriented. Did this really happen to me?

The short view was this:  My surgery was great, my heart undamaged, I got out of the hospital in record-breaking time, I am an open heart surgery superstar, everywhere I go, people tell me how good I look, how well I appear to be doing. I’m working on my book, my blog, my photos, every single day, when I am not walking up one hill or another.  By Labor Day, I concluded I will be done with this and moving on with renewed energy and focus to expand the boundaries of my life.

I love the short view, I always have, but the problem with the short view is that it is a short view, and thus rarely wise or true, it does not follow the true path of life. The last few weeks have opened my eyes and my heart to the long view, which goes more like this:

Heart disease is chronic, life-threatening and not cureable, just like diabetes. So I have two chronic diseases that cannot be cured, but can sometimes be treated and controlled with much work and care. I had a heart attack, not just some chest pains and shortness of breath, I could have another one, and around Labor Day I will just be beginning months of cardiac re-habitation, learning many new movements and exercises and begin what will be a life-long undertaking to get well and stay well. Pills and procedures, the very thing I shunned in the short view, are her to stay for the duration, that is the long view.

My doctor and I have some major differences to discuss – he wants to keep me alive forever, and I have no desire to stay alive forever. We have to work it out. But you can see that the long view is different than the short view, which I have always favored and which no longer makes much sense to me, and, in fact, nearly killed me.

This is a big change,  one’s worldview, and so I am right back on the hero journey, where your adventure with me began some years ago, right her on this blog, my voice to the world, my great work, my living memoir. I have heard the call to adventure and heeded it, death was nipping at my heels like a hungry puppy. In the world of mythology, this is known as moving into the great beyond, crossing the threshold from the conscious into the unconscious world. It might be a plunge into the ocean, it might be getting lost walking in the dark forest, it might mean floating adrift in the ocean, it might mean finding your heart is sick and having it opened up and taken apart.

The idea of the hero journey is to walk bodily through the door and into the mystery of life. This is where I now am. This is the long view writ large. This is the rest of my life, there is really no short view of that.

It is all there, the encounter with the dark counterpart, the shadow, where the hero leaves the shining light and steps into the darkness. In myth, you are either dismembered or resurrected. This, I understand now, is also where I am, both dismembered and perhaps, resurrected. It is, I imagine, what I make of it.

I have crossed a threshold, and once I have crossed, it really is my adventure and no one else’s – not even the many other people who have been dismembered and returned to life, or the many other people who rush to tell me they have suffered too. I know this, it is the foundation of the long view.

But this is my journey, it iis now a journey that reflects my own individual spiritual need and strength and readiness to live meaningfully. These are my challenges then, this is my work. Self-realization, the glorious process of initiation into the mysteries of life.

This is the long view I have always hidden from, and never fully grasped. It is true, I believe, that everything is a gift, grace is our response to the darkness, not denying it all of our lives. I do not have time to waste. I will not waste it. The long view is closer to grace, to wisdom, to awakening and self-realization.

All of my life, I ran from the long view, and now it is upon me and I think it holds the key to awakening, the secret to life.