The moment that changed my life

I'm the kind of person that always loves a good psychological movie, something that sinks deep in your brain and makes you feel all out of sync when you walk out of the theater. That's the reason I go for the documentary tab on Netflix and feel I get so much more entertainment out of those choices than most other films. About a year ago I stumbled on a top rated documentary right up my alley, not one on history or airplanes or Hitler's secret mistress, but simply about us and why we're here: "I Am."

To be completely honest, I don't remember much from the documentary itself. I even had to look up the title. All I remember was being inspired by the many featured authors, scientists, and other guests on the show who spoke about our collective purpose here as people. The guests, which included the prolific Noam Chomsky, were all introduced along with a book they had written. After watching the video I made a nice lengthy must-read list and set myself to reading each of the titles. Here's the list:

David Suzuki - The Sacred Balance 

Thom Hartmann - The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight 

Noam Chomsky 

Lynne McTaggart - The Field 

Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States

John Francis - Planetwalker

Daniel Quinn - Ishmael 

Vaclav Smil - Global Catastrophes and Trends 

Marc Barasch - Field Notes on the Compassionate Life 

Ronal Wright - A Short History of Progress

Gary Marcus - The Birth of the Mind 

Margaret Atwood - Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth 

Robert Wright - Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

Earth Grab: Geopiracy, the New Biomassters, and Capturing Climate Genes

Colin Beavan - No Impact Man

I've only read four so far and I can already say that my way of life is so completely transformed that the new ideas feel like they've now been hard-wired into my brain forever. I'm not going to go into a book review of each one but these are the four:

David Suzuki's The Sacred Balance, Lynne McTaggart's The Field, Thom Hartmann's The Prophet, and my favorite so far, Robert Wright's A Short History of Progress

How these four books have changed my life...

The documentary I saw on Netflix was not the push factor for this inquiry into life's biggest questions. It was the sudden, shocking death of my best friend who I was traveling and living abroad with. Brian and I decided to give up our jobs in Los Angeles for a taste of the unknown, living and teaching English in Vietnam. We spent the first two months zigzagging Southeast Asia and finally settled down in Saigon. It was truly living the dream. We didn't make a whole lot of money but it all felt like one big roller coaster ride, at least for the first year. Just as things began to wind down and we were planning our next adventure, Brian suddenly fell ill with a bug that completely destroyed his immune system. It baffled the doctors, and to this day we don't have any real answers. He put up the fight of his life and sadly passed away last July, not long after his 29th birthday. Brian and I were so close and just his being there was so natural to me, losing him felt like waking up with my right arm missing. I doesn't feel like I'll ever fully comprehend it.

I'm sure I was like most people who lose a loved one, I hung on to his memory. I stayed positive and felt him urging me to go on living. I could hear him telling me to make the most of my remaining time here. But it doesn't just end there. I decided not to dismiss those messages as part of the grieving process, but as actual message from him. When I felt him, I would even answer out loud, "Got it." So then what was I to do? How would I live? Some things were immediately clear:

Nothing is really that hard. By that I mean, what I've always thought were difficult and stressful, REALLY aren't. Exercising, not difficult. Relationship problems, not difficult. Money, not difficult. That might seem a bit crazy in this world of busy schedules, high divorce rates, child support payments, new computer models, and loads of people to impress, but when you're still alive and have people in your life who love you, those things mean nothing. I'm not saying that I no longer think about them, or am free of them weighing on my mind (I'm not Buddha reincarnated and fasting in a mountain cave), but I feel like I can stop them from stressing me out. Brian helps me with that. I think of him not being here, and how much he would disapprove of me using up precious time on Earth worrying about meaningless things. Then here comes David Suzuki to reinforce that:

"What is the meaning of life? Answer: life. Why are we here? Answer: to be here, to be-long, to be."

That hit me like a lightning bolt. We get so caught up in the hundreds of distractions our culture bombards us with that we forget that the fact that we are simply here is a beautiful miracle. I stopped at that specific part of The Sacred Balance, and just thought about how much I loved the people in my life, not for experiences we've had or the times they made me laugh, but just for being here with me at this moment in time.