Geoff Stahl
For the past few weeks, I’ve been contending with what my doctor has now diagnosed as an ecotopic arrhythmia. Unlike tachycardia, which is the more serious version of an irregular heartbeat, mine is the benign sort. It’s not necessarily life threatening, though it can be if it intensifies. The sensation is of my heart missing a beat occasionally, not all the time, but with some frequency. It gives me pause, to say the least. The blood work, cholesterol tests, liver and kidneys are all good. Blood pressure is low, but a healthy low. It’s stress related more than likely. Now that I’ve cut out caffeine and reduced alcohol consumption to just about nil, things seem somewhat better. However, there is this strange sensation that my heart will just stop at some point, and not start again.
The funny thing is, I’m not particularly frightened by this. Yes, yes, I get somewhat put out when it happens, that goes without saying, but in quieter moments, after it passes, I think of the bigger picture.
Sure, I’d like to stick around for a bit longer, for all sorts of obvious and not so obvious reasons (hey I’ve got a girl who loves me and wants me around as well, and I’m keen to give her as much of my love as possible, which is really reason numero uno). You should pardon my tone here. I’m very matter-of-fact about this, which might seem odd. But I’ve got just cause, I think. First of all, I’m happy to have been to all the places I’ve been, to have met all the people I’ve met and to have done all the things I’ve done. Never did I imagine that once I’d finished highschool I’d go to Montreal, travel to countries like Western Samoa, Thailand, Japan, the Netherlands, Estonia, the UK, Turkey, and India, live in places like Australia, Germany, Sweden, Finland, and now New Zealand. All of these experiences often astound me, when I take time to ponder them and what they’ve meant to me and how I got to where I am now. There are regrets and I’ve done and said things that I wish I could repair somehow, of course. Apologies need to be made and a few more thank yous as well. This goes without saying. Overall, however, I’m content with where I’m at, and I still have time (methinks) to sort out many of these niggling concerns.
Of course, when you put it into my general world view, it could be seen as all for nought, really, when it comes down to it, which becomes clearer when you consider my second reason:
I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in a higher power of any sort. Never have. I’m secular through and through. Which is to say, that for me when the heart stops, so does the rest of the machinery and that’s it. Blackness. It’s as simple and stark as that, really. Nothing to be afraid of, not meeting my maker and being judged fit or unfit to pass through some pearly gates or burn in any fires of perdition, traverse some river or other, or doing anything else that sees my “soul” journeying elsewhere.
There are moments when my atheism gets poked and prodded a bit and I’ll launch into a tirade or two about it. I cast my mind back to one moment, where I was particularly put off when after my father died people kept trotting out platitudes like “Things happen for a reason.” Not for a second do I think they meant to say that he had a bad heart that just gave out; i.e., a medical reason. They meant something else which they thought was consoling, an appeal to another force, as though there is something called “fate” or some divine hand guiding us, one which decided, for some unknown reason, to take my father away (they say these things to console themselves, I think). For me, fate is nothing but a sequence of chance events, an arbitariness plugged into convenient narrative templates that help us make sense of the world, a kind of commonsensical fuzzy logic. Instead, I follow that old school existential mantra that we are condemned to be free, which always sounds grandiose when put that way (thanks JPS), but is really a pragmatic way of seeing ourselves as necessarily and ethically committed to being in this world, not beholden to the promise of access to some shadowy nether region that we should otherwise aspire to.
All of which is to say: I’m not afraid of the dark.
Le G.