Life After A Near-Death Experience

One realizes the full importance of time only when there is little of it left. Every man's greatest capital asset is his unexpired years of productive life.
- P. W. Litchfield

As a group, surely those who have survived near-death experiences--such as recovering from a severe version of cancer--must be the happiest and self-fulfilled people around.

Here's one example:"Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because my illness was also my antidote: it cured me of laziness." - Lance Armstrong (US seven-time Tour De France winner, who survived testicular cancer)

What is there about surviving a dangerous event or escaping death that allows those people to appreciate every minute they have afterward?

Some consider it a "second life," but that's a euphemism for making better use of time especially showing their appreciation of and love for others. Being given "a second chance" is another way of putting it. That's not the whole answer.

These people learned a profound lesson from deep personal experience, one they didn't have the opportunity to know before.

Is that it? Do we have to survive death to live life to the fullest? Well, many people who have experienced a religious awakening (epiphany) or found what they have been looking for in terms of a religious affiliation enjoy life thereafter in much the same way.

Something changes them. Something at a deep personal level.

Note that these examples all involve adults. Can they--do they--happen as well with children? Yes, but we tend to consider these situations of the teacher-plus-student-plus-lesson format. In other words, kids learn life lessons from teachers; sometimes the teachers are their own parents.
We can influence the lives of children in profound and magnificent ways if we teach them life lessons at the right times. However, this seldom happens, or at least too infrequently.

Rarely are such important life lessons found on school curriculum. Ironically, we would never find time devoted in curriculum for tending to discipline problems either. Yet these can take a huge amount of classroom time in some schools.

I say "ironically" because the two situations are related, directly. Children and adolescents want to know about life more than they want to know how to do calculus or speak another language. They're built that way, just like the young of every other primate and mammalian species.

They want and need to know some things about life--including how to make friends and how to have the skills necessary to do the social exercises necessary to learn about finding life partners--so much so that they resent being "forced" to learn other things that mean little to them at the time. So they may misbehave, drop out or rebel as a way to express their dissatisfaction and discomfort at not receiving what they know naturally they should have from their parents or teachers.

Epiphanies may happen to those children, as adults, who have had a thorough spectrum of learning experiences with life, social and emotional development. But they may be less profound if they have learned the skills they need to find what they require in life when they were young. The results are the same, but the change less significant.

We prepare (or should prepare) children to be people, not just occupiers of jobs. Schools, in general, prepare children for jobs they will or could have as adults.

Someone--schools, parents or a religion--needs to prepare them for life. It's not happening now, at least not with many kids. We have lots of adults around who have problems and don't know how to cope with them. They take strange and even self-destructive routes to cope with their problems because they don't know what else to do.

These life lessons would be both easy and cheap to teach in schools.

We need to authorize our departments of education, our boards of education, our schools, our administrators and our teaches to meet the most important needs that our children are not having met now.

Not only would we have far fewer problems in our communities, our families and our personal lives, the taxes our governments require to deal with miscreants and criminals today would be drastically reduced in the future if such a program were implemented in schools.

One thing is for certain, no school curriculum will change on its own. It likely won't happen without your support.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers, the "missing link" in today's education process.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

How To Cope With The Worst Of Times

Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power."
- Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher (c. 4 BCE – CE 65)

I'm not certain that happiness consists of enduring the highest and lowest fortune has to offer. Most of us endure such highs and lows (or believe we do) during our lives.

Depriving misfortune of its power by living through the vicissitudes of life can hardly be the road to happiness if all of us that don't die in the process manage to live through them. Enduring them with steadiness of mind may be a sign of emotional flatness, an inability to feel strong emotions, even in times of stress.

Seneca's true meaning may have been lost in translation. I'm going to say he meant that people who can live through the trials of their lives as well as the high points without succumbing to excesses or emotional trauma were well prepared to face them.

Being able to cope with the best of times and the worst of times requires skill and knowledge. The knowledge is pretty simple. To cope with these eventualities, we need to know that they will come, both the good and the bad, and that we will survive them and return to some sort of normal state of life. Bad always passes, for everyone, so long as they live through it. Exceptionally good times don't last forever either.

Just knowing that much makes us prepared to face the ups and downs of life better.
The skill part of being prepared for the inevitable variations of life means having the ability to see past the emotional element to the results or consequences that will follow.

If we are going to a place we haven't been before and we travel for hours without knowing exactly where we are, we might feel that we're lost. Even if we know we are following a route proposed for us, we may feel uncomfortable about the fact that nothing around us is familiar. Yet if we focus on the road as the path to the goal and not as a place of discomfort and unfamiliarity, we can get through the trip knowing that the end we want to reach will arrive, in time. We aren't lost if we know we're on the right path.

Life is the same. If we know that hard times will befall us, we have a plan to get through them and something to fall back on to ease the strain, we can feel confident that we will get through them safely. If we know that good times won't last forever and prepare a plan to account for severe downturns, we can live through them with equanimity as well.

Preparation, having a plan for coping, is the key.

Most people fear bad times but have no plan for coping with them when they arrive. They also don't likely have a plan to get through good times without indulging in excesses ("We've got to have a bigger house and a better car"). When either arrives, they fall apart (in some sense), though in different ways. Look at the statistics of what happens to the lives of lottery winners, even though they may buy tickets for years hoping to win.

We don't have to live our lives as if we are going to die next month or next week. But we should keep in mind that some day the very last day of our life will come. We need to make sure that we have taken into account everything we would like to have accomplished, no matter when that day may arrive. That includes what we might say to or do with our loved ones. That day may come decades from now, or it might come tomorrow.

Worse, for many of us, would be when our spouse dies (or leaves the family home). Though we may be as devoted as possible to our mate, we also need to consider the possibility that a day of being alone may come. If we have a plan for what we would do if that eventuality should arrive, we can put the plan into effect and survive it as safely and with as little self destruction as possible.

Life is not just a matter of living. Living through the vicissitudes of life requires us to have plans we can put into effect when fortune deals us a bad hand or a particularly good one at any unexpected time.

What would you do?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the knowledge and skills they need to live with equanimity through the ups and downs of life, and to teach them before they're needed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com