A friend who has been facing some health challenges recently shared with me two pre-surgery goals. The first goal was simple: stay alive.
Now there’s a treatment goal! Seeing it typed in stark relief in a text made me think about the importance of priorities in our lives and how we are frequently able – and sometimes required – to have laser-like focus on those priorities.
It also made me think of the Bee Gees’ song from the 1970s. Stayin’ Alive.
I don’t intend to be disrespectful: I am deeply cognizant of the risks that my friend was, and is, encountering. I’m humbled by and more than a little fearful of those risks. Many illnesses are not to be treated as trifles. They are serious. They have serious implications for the person who must face them, as well as for that person’s family and friends.
But I am trained in the healing arts and part of that training, at regular intervals along the way, has involved learning to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR. Such training includes the practice of when and how to perform chest compressions. It also includes the ability to pace oneself while doing those compressions. Adrenaline can overwhelm any situation, even for the experienced practitioner. Which is where the Bee Gee’s song comes into play: the tempo of Stayin’ Alive happens to correlate nicely to the appropriate number of chest compressions recommended during each minute of adult resuscitation.
Let me acknowledge the obvious: there is a certain irony regarding the song’s title and its clinical use. But here’s something important to know, if you’ve (hopefully) been spared the opportunity to perform chest compressions on another human in crisis: the song helps. Thinking of it focuses mind and body on the vital task at hand. In addition, it reminds the person behind the compressing hands that, not only is there method to the activity, there is a clear goal.
Staying alive.
It is reassuring, stabilizing even, to have a clear goal. Small things in life feel smaller. Unimportant things are jettisoned, excess is thrown overboard from the moment, from the “now”, in order that the vessel in which we find ourselves, the minute in which we live, remain sufficiently light to keep us afloat.
As I write this, I am sitting in a coffee shop. It is evening and I am breaking my self-imposed rule of two cups of caffeine per day by having a chai tea. I am lost in the flow of this blog. Unexpectedly, right at this moment here, my concentration on computer and blog is broken by the figure of a shabbily dressed man who slips in the side door, just outside my left peripheral vision, and slides into a chair at the vacant table next to me, on the right. Although he moves quietly from one side of my visual field to the other, he suddenly commands all my attention. There is nothing threatening about him. There is only the sense of his needs. I can feel it. I don’t need to see it. The man sits motionless, then rises, moves across the coffee shop to the rest room and, a couple of minutes later, returns. Again, he sits in a chair three feet away, still as a held breath. Slowly, he pulls some change from his pocket, counts it on the table. I sneak a glance. He says nothing. He does not look at me. He does not disturb me. And yet I cannot take my attention away from him. His unwashed flannel shirt is insufficient for the night cold. As if he can read my mind, he pulls a pair of tattered blue gloves from a shirt pocket and lays them neatly on the table in front of him. He does not move. He stares at the inventory before him.
What next?
What else? He has come in from the dark and cold. He is, perhaps, without a plan and is intensely focused on right now. Here. He is – is he? – just staying alive.
There is only one thing for me to do. There is only one thing for my hands to do. I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the cash I find. I take a deep breath and stand, then turn, and let those hands softly slide the cash in front of him. I leave. Glancing over my shoulder, my eyes meet his. He nods. A soft “thank you” rolls across the cafe like a light breeze.
There is a feeling after successfully performing chest compressions, when the pulse in the body returns, when breathing returns with that pulse, when the team disperses. Some of us have rushed to the resuscitation scene under emergency conditions. We do not know the person’s chest we have compressed. And yet we have focused on the process for that person, that process’s goal. We have played our part.
If only I could continuously bring such a clear awareness to the course of my daily life. If only I could remember to keep playing my part.
I am blessed with not having to personally worry – today – about “stayin’ alive”. I am, however, blessed with the opportunity – today – to truly be alive.