“I’m going down now,” I said to a young woman a few seconds before the darkness—my first cardiac arrest. As I returned to work as a behavioral coach, it became maddening to hear, for the ten-thousandth time, about all-consuming problems and misguided priorities while I fought to merely remain conscious.
The Half-Known Life challenges conventional thinking of success, identity, and personal change. Most often, truly-profound change happens following events that shake someone to their core—a car accident, death of a family member, or cardiac arrest that pulls them into a moment of clarity. Priorities change when time becomes precious. Problems look different when you have no energy left to give them. After all, marathon runners don’t say much on mile twenty; they choose to breathe. And all I have to give is channeled into each moment that I, too, choose to breathe.
Why wait until you’re burnt out or for a life-changing event to occur before getting real about your life? Who are you when all of the accolades and accomplishments are gone? What does how you manage your time say about what’s important to you?
Get out of your head and get into your life, before it slips away.
“I’m going down now,” I said to a young woman a few seconds before the darkness—my first cardiac arrest. As I returned to work as a behavioral coach, it became maddening to hear, for the ten-thousandth time, about all-consuming problems and misguided priorities while I fought to merely remain conscious.
The Half-Known Life challenges conventional thinking of success, identity, and personal change. Most often, truly-profound change happens following events that shake someone to their core—a car accident, death of a family member, or cardiac arrest that pulls them into a moment of clarity. Priorities change when time becomes precious. Problems look different when you have no energy left to give them. After all, marathon runners don’t say much on mile twenty; they choose to breathe. And all I have to give is channeled into each moment that I, too, choose to breathe.
Why wait until you’re burnt out or for a life-changing event to occur before getting real about your life? Who are you when all of the accolades and accomplishments are gone? What does how you manage your time say about what’s important to you?
Get out of your head and get into your life, before it slips away.
It was the day everything went black.
“I’m going down now,” I said to a young woman a few seconds before the darkness—my first cardiac arrest. I knew it was coming, even if only for a few seconds. What I didn’t realize was that I was just beginning a years-long journey whereby through near-constant dizziness and fatigue—the ebbs and flows of a myriad of strange symptoms—I would come face-to-face with the clock of life that’s wound but once.
We all have this clock, but I can always hear its tick, the ever-present reminder to manage my energy as I walk the tightrope, always a misstep away from falling into my dark world again.
When I opened my eyes after my second cardiac arrest, less than a day after the first, a ring of doctors and nurses encircled my hospital bed. Stroking my forehead, a nurse softly comforted me. “You’re okay,” she whispered. I still see flashes of her face.
What happened to me was a big mystery, it seemed, and in the days and weeks that followed, I tried to make sense of it. I had a random, unexplained cardiac event, and this strange mechanical device in my chest not much larger than a silver dollar was now supposed to keep me alive.
“It’s my first step toward becoming a cyborg,” I often joked. But it was hard to trust this small, battery-operated lump bulging from my chest under another scar.
Lying in the hospital bed, I pictured my life years ago—the struggle: My shirt was filthy and smelled of the pizza sauce that painted it from collar to tail. Working any job I could get, I often found myself working into the night, waiting tables, delivering pizzas, and sustaining myself on old, discarded breadsticks I’d eat in my car. My shoes were held on with duct tape, although it never kept my socks from becoming soaked in the rain. That situation seemed so hopeless. Is this all my life is? I’d think. Is this all I am? I held back tears.
But after years of what seemed like a never-ending nightmare, I emerged on the other side—the side of success—and landed what I would’ve once called my “dream job.”
Things seemed to finally be going well . . . until they weren’t—until the darkness came.
I sat in the hospital bed after the darkness, each breath a reminder that, yes, I was alive. For how long, no one could tell. I struggled to process the gravity of what had just happened.
I had no personal or family history of heart problems. I was young and a former collegiate athlete who ate what most would call obsessively, even annoyingly “clean.” I consumed a mostly plant-based diet, was a nonsmoker, and for many years I logged my sleep.
As a behavioral coach, personal development specialist, and trainer helping many people shift toward new perspectives and life changes in order to become well, I was dedicated to that same wellness. So it was especially hard to grasp why I suddenly became the youngest of my doctor’s patients with a pacemaker.
For most people, especially the young, mortality is a foggy, distant idea. This wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did. One moment I was fine, and the next, I was a crumpled mass on the floor, a shell—a sum total of a network of blood vessels, neurons, and chemicals that were all once part of a person. Was I more than that?
Sometimes I think of the stories of young athletes who just drop dead one day at football practice in the August heat. “That’s me,” I said as I tried to explain things to so many curious people. I had questions, too. I was that guy, except I had the right people around to help at precisely the right time.
Only moments earlier, I had been driving. What would I have done then?
I’ve always appreciated the simpler times of the past, without all the noise. I’m often captivated by antiques, imagining the story behind something created when things weren’t so commercialized; there was more beauty. Sometimes I even joke that perhaps I was born at the wrong time. But at any other time, without all the medical advances—the pacemakers, defibrillators, and all the other makings of a cyborg—I’d be dead.
“What if you were alone?” people sometimes ask.
“What happened?! Did you see a white light?”
“No,” I answer, disappointedly. “But it was hot and smelled a bit like sulfur . . .”
I knew little about what caused the event necessitating my pacemaker, and I struggled to make sense of my life in all the familiar ways—a life that seemed to be suddenly, wildly spinning out of control, and in which now so much felt empty.
The dizziness is the hardest to explain. I mean, how do you describe the color blue? There aren’t words to describe some things. But I sometimes feel like my head’s in a vise, underwater. There’s weakness in my extremities as if I’m not quite in control. There’s also extreme fatigue that no amount of sleep mitigates.
Then there’s the teetering on the edge of consciousness. With one foot in this world and another foot in the darkness, I become clammy, light-headed, and my vision blurs as the fringes of my field of view close. And, yes, I’ve seen all the specialists—the best. But all I can do is treat symptoms; the cause is a mystery.
The worst thing is the moment the darkness comes, when it closes in: that terrifying moment and the utter loss of control, knowing there’s not a damn thing I can do—the horror of living moment to moment thinking it’s your last, thinking it’s all happening again and again and that it never stops. That’s where I live, waiting for the dormant, the darkness, the monster that awaits.
After my two cardiac arrests, with no paid time off and in dire financial need, I chose to return to work against my doctor’s orders. And a few days after leaving the ICU, I was back at the office.
I’ve had thousands of clients, including members of all four military branches—physicians, psychologists, business executives, and even organizations. I helped them explore ways to shift within themselves, to maximize their time and transform aspects of their lives they were too busy to live. I helped them through change—change in career, relationship, health, and habits.
Everything seemed different after the darkness.Â
As I returned to work, it became maddening to hear, for the ten thousandth time, about all-consuming everyday problems and misguided priorities. I fought to remain conscious while I listened to the thralls of bathroom remodels and kids’ soccer practices, the trivial work gossip, or complaints of afternoon traffic.
Despite being in the business of helping people realize what really matters in their lives and how to get it, it took a cardiac arrest for the author to finally understand what really matters about life in general and how to get the best out of it.
After being so close to death, the author awakened with a new perspective on life that he explores in The Half-Known Life: What Matters Most When You're Running Out of Time.
In this book, Mr. Ryan Lindner goes on to challenge all people deem so important they allow it to fill up their lives to the point they no longer really feel alive, from what they keep themselves so busy with that they can’t spare a moment to enjoy a sunset, to their priorities, to being burnt out, to their relationships, even to what they classify as “love” and “hate”. This book encourages people to rethink their lives and live their lives by their own life’s terms.
The book also includes inspirational quotes as well as the author’s “Lessons from Near Death”. The main aim is to have people live life and not regret anything when they eventually run out of time, but to have lived life to the fullest, a life worth living, not lamenting and regretting and rushing through.
The author doesn’t shy away from using personal experiences and real-life examples that are bound to feel relatable to the readers as we’re all guilty at one point or the other (if not always) of not living the life we truly want and claim that we don’t know why.
Some segments of the book were repetitive, but the message is worth repeating until it makes it through to the reader.
The whole book feels like a lovely chat with a wise person who has seen death and came back to tell us to live. The author’s style is very warm and encouraging despite being realistic and accusatory (the author just honestly tells the readers that all that they think matters doesn’t). Reading this book is like finally being given an honest chat about life from someone who is lucky to be living it again.
I recommend this book to all those who want to actively change their lives to the better and not have any regrets when their time comes.