A Swiss Man's Heart Condition Taught Him to Waste No Time
A while back I had dinner with a Swiss man named OT.
He was in his early sixties, notably witty and quick in conversation.
He went to Stanford and worked his way through places like Swiss banks as an IT crisis management specialist.
These days he sits on the board of a company that bridges business between Switzerland and the US.
At some point he had a major heart condition.
He barely survived, and even now half his heart’s function still doesn’t work.
According to him, he’s currently living on a “lease on life.”
He’s borrowing his life.
“So I’m 15 years old right now,” he said.
What he said next stuck with me.
“I changed dramatically. I learned that life isn’t long. So I don’t want to do things that aren’t fun, and I don’t want to do pointless things. I don’t want to spend time with people I dislike, and I don’t want to eat bad food.”
Here’s a slightly funny but concrete example of what that means for him.
OT’s hobby is golf.
Normally you play a round with four people, but of course it’s fine to play with one or two.
In that case, though, you sometimes get paired with one or two random other people.
That’s how golf courses keep groups moving through faster.
This isn’t unusual anywhere.
I’ve experienced it myself, and most of the time you just play the round out amicably, smiling the whole way.
(One friend of mine actually ended up getting married because of this, lol)
But occasionally you run into people with terrible manners,
or people who won’t stop talking to you when you’re trying to play seriously,
people who just don’t read the room.
So what does OT do in that case?
“I go home at the third hole.”
He can’t stand having time he came to enjoy ruined by people like that.
OT also loves wine.
I couldn’t follow maybe 30% of his detailed commentary, but one thing stuck with me:
“I don’t drink anything under 90 points on the Parker rating.”
This refers to a rating system devised by Robert Parker, a famous American wine critic.
The ratings apply regardless of price, and they’re supposedly held in high regard as “extremely useful for ordinary people.”
They’re apparently well-known enough to have a Japanese Wikipedia page.
For health reasons, OT has also set a daily limit on how much wine he drinks.
So he ends up thinking, “How many more bottles of wine can I drink before I die?”
And from there: “It’s a waste to try something I already know will taste bad.”
Naturally, this is debatable.
Someone with a terrible first impression might become a lifelong friend, and something you thought you could trust might, in rare exceptions, miss the mark.
But he’s realized that life isn’t long or leisurely enough to postpone judgment out of consideration for that “just in case,” or to take needlessly big risks.
He learned that from an experience where he could have died without warning.
I feel a bit sheepish agreeing so strongly in front of someone with so much more life experience than me, greenhorn that I am by comparison.
Still, I understand what he means.
Life is short.
The first time I felt that, admittedly in a fairly mundane way, was when I saw the news that the common-law husband of Dreams Come True’s vocalist had died at the same age as me.
http://matome.naver.jp/odai/2133229561467353501
Apparently, by the time his illness was discovered, he had three months to live.
Someone my own age, given three months to live, out of nowhere.
On top of that, one of my close friends actually ended up facing the possibility of death head-on.
It was acute leukemia.
She fought through it and recovered, and now lives a life close to normal.
But nothing goes back to exactly how it was before she got sick.
She had to give up her path as a career bureaucrat, a graduate of the University of Tokyo.
Whether that was, in the end, fortunate or unfortunate for her isn’t something anyone but her can decide.
But it’s certain that the plans she’d laid out needed revising, to a greater or lesser degree.
None of this is rare.
And thinking “this has nothing to do with me” when it’s happening right in front of you,
that’s the strange position to be in.
Now: I might die tomorrow.
So what would I do?
Stay up late finishing the manga I haven’t gotten through yet?
Eat whatever I want since dieting is pointless now?
Give up on quitting smoking and go back to two packs a day?
That’s not what this is about.
Death is an absolute event that comes for everyone eventually.
Facing it with a fleeting, live-for-the-moment attitude isn’t desirable.
Apparently, there was a period when a Gnostic idea spread among believers in Judaism: “Since heaven exists, this life doesn’t matter.”
That’s a negative side effect religion can produce.
But there’s no way it doesn’t matter. Because you’re alive.
Incidentally, this idea was quickly rejected and corrected.
I imagine it spread against a backdrop of harsh economic, climate, health, and other social conditions.
Faith ended up being used as an escape from reality.
Now, bringing this back to everyday life:
“I might die tomorrow” should translate into “let’s make today the best it can be.”
For example, I’ve heard of people taking on home renovations.
They want to spend their final days in a comfortable home.
For example, I’ve heard of people getting interested in yoga.
They wanted a more genuine dialogue with their own irreplaceable body.
It doesn’t need to be drastic, doesn’t need to be something out of a manga. Ordinary is fine.
Whether the fact that life is limited makes you think “I need to bet bigger!” is simply a matter of personality, not some universal logic.
For example, the idea that “as a member of capitalist society, one ought to contribute to economic development” is also just “one direction based on a certain set of values,” never a universal logic.
To put it in extreme terms: who decided that development is a good thing in the first place?
What matters more is this:
Wake up feeling refreshed, feel gratitude for the start of the day, savor the joy of work, eat good food, and at day’s end feel grateful for everything that happened.
The stance is to take this as the baseline and eliminate whatever gets in its way.
Without this gratitude, conversely, there’s no meaning in being alive.
If you can’t wake up feeling refreshed, get your body in shape so you can sleep well.
If you feel gloomy about what you have to do the moment you wake up, reconsider that daily life.
If you don’t feel joy in your work, find work that’s more fulfilling.
Enjoy your meals, wrap up your work properly at the office, go home early, and sit down at the table with your family.
If, at the end of the day, you find yourself thinking “nothing good happened today,” you don’t need to keep living that way.
Change everything starting tomorrow so you can have a more enjoyable day.
“Live today to the fullest!” isn’t just a nice-sounding platitude, but at the same time it’s not some impossible task set at an absurdly high bar either.
It just means: don’t do meaningless things, don’t spend time on things that aren’t enjoyable, don’t do things you already know you’ll regret later, so that you can feel grateful for each day and properly cherish the things that matter.
That’s all it takes: actively making improvements instead of letting things get buried in inertia.
But said in words like this, it’s still nothing but a nice sentiment.
When you actually try to put it into practice, of course all kinds of obstacles tangle together and get in the way.
And at times like that, the words that usually come barging in are “money” and “the future.”
If I get fired I’ll be in financial trouble.
If I don’t put up with this now, I won’t get promoted later.
It’s not interesting work, but it pays.
My body’s exhausted, but the overtime pay helps with the loan.
And so on.
But everyone already knows what makes them happy, what’s meaningless, and what actually matters.
Still, sometimes you can’t muster the courage to decide.
For those moments only, pull out this line:
“Well, I might die tomorrow anyway.”
That’s all you need.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2014/02/93/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.