You only live twice.

You only live twice., upload feito originalmente por fubuki.

Life changes. You change. It's the only constant.

Three weeks ago I made a day trip to Las Pozas, the estate of the late Edward James. James was a sculptor cum patron of the surrealist movement. He was close friends with Salvador Dali and Andre Breton; in fact, Dali basically said James was completely bat shit and the craziest person he had ever met! James built a pleasure garden of surreal sculpture and architecture deep in the rain forests of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains in eastern Mexico. By map and finger tracing, it's a two hour drive from San Miguel, but in reality its a slow, winding 6 hour journey along deadman curves along two thousand foot cliffs. On a good road trip, you can put your mind to pasture and melt into your music, but this drive demands the nervous vigilance of cobra charmers and chainsaw jugglers. But the view is to die for...literally. Sheer cliffs of slutty green rain forest where the clouds are a quarter mile below surround you for grindingly slow, hard right, hard left, brake riding hours. At one moment, I came out of a sharp turn to face this gorgeous tropical chasm and I smiled, just as I went into another sharp turn. For some reason, someone had laid down gravel in this next blind curve. Gravel has a low traction coefficient. Enter Newton and classical circular motion physics. Gravel slides. I slid with the efficient centrifugal force of failure towards the cliff edge.

Ah Death, we meet again, you mountebank.

All the while, Shirley Bassey is crooning the James Bond classic 'You Only Live Twice' on my iPod.

Your life doesn't flash before your eyes. Adrenaline is not an introspective drug.

Shit. The only rational image in my head was that I was going to fall into a pool of green for several minutes and no one would ever know where I died. I was going to disappear. Pebble in a pond. You hear these lamentable stories of folks driving off I-95 in Florida into a swamp groove, trapped by broken limbs, living off packets of ketchup until death collects them and road crews find the remains several weeks later. I wasn't going to be that fortunate. I was three hours away from the nearest nowhere.

This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.

I want to pause for a minute to lay down a shout out to the brainstem and its 500,000 million year of fight-flight reflex programming. The brainstem doesn't wait around for the frontal lobe to form a quorum. He's the ultimate go-to guy once adrenaline wakes him up.

My brainstem turned hard against the turn, cutting the kinetic slide into the forest maw and the truck came to a slow stop right at the edge of the road. Final scene forstalled.

And life restarted. Again.

Its a crying shame we need these cataclysmic events to quiet the muddled congress of our thoughts. Everything becomes a very simple calculus when you get it that life is not short and it is not long. It just is. There is no shortcut out of the maze of mirrors. You are here and then you are not. Normally we come to this point and think, 'Hey, life has no guarantees so the smart play is to live for today, seize the day, live for the moment,' but that's just living life like a serial one-night stander. You wake the next morning feeling a little sated but seedy. Its the gambler's path, irrationally betting everything that the next roll will be the big payoff. Conversely, the long view is its own delusion. It suckers and succors you that everything will be taken care in time, that patience is the toll for success. You let yourself fall asleep to dream about tomorrow.

Here's my prescription the good life: be alive. Take chances. Forget trying to look around the next blind curve. Do something new, not to notch your belt, but to extend yourself into that space where your fear holds court. Live with dignity - protect it in yourself and share it freely with others. Be moderately immoderate. Listen more. Speak with sincerity. Forgive yourself completely, but forgive others more. Yes, life is a wonderful wine cellar to taste and enjoy, but learn to make wine yourself and share it with your friends. Being angry and being afraid are your greatest enemies. Shoot them on sight, but better, give them compassion and honesty; you'll find more often than not that they will willingly surrender the floor once they have been heard. But dont hesitate to put those recalcitrant, tantrumy little bitches on time out if need be and get back to living. The biggest thing is this: Life is not about winning the lottery in the Now or some Tomorrow. For that matter, lottery winners almost always end up broke and broken.

Life is about how you live.

Go figure. It takes a deadman's curve to be alive. Who knew?

Go live, friends, right now...and tomorrow.

Who wants to live forever?
Forever is our today