One morning Jade woke up to a slight headache. It wasn’t anything to be alarmed about, headaches happen. An Aspirin later and Jade was his old self again, ready to dive into the day, coding with his co-workers at a Silicon Valley startup. Things had been intense lately, more intense than in previous teams or companies, but aren’t all startups supposed to be like that, he asked himself? Just one more feature, one more hour, one more late night and we would reach Product Market Fit, we told ourselves. As the intensity, so did the headache; it persisted. Aspirin carried Jade through the first couple of weeks. Eventually though, they were no longer effective and he went to see a doctor. A few brief questions, tests and an MRI later, clarity emerged: brain tumor, a few short years to live.
I sometimes wonder in awe, almost marble at our inability to see life as it really is: A fleeting moment in time. A microsecond on the cosmic clock. We are nothing but a grain of sand on the vast seabed of the Pacific. Our own perceived self-importance in contrast to our true insignificance in the universe; what a miraculous paradox. Because nothing matters, everything becomes important to us. Life, full of these paradoxes, seems to have an almost sickening irony at times. The death of tens of thousands half way around the world makes us shrug. Years of destruction, genocide and murder leave us unimpacted, but the loss of a single life, close to us can cause years of pain. Our own tolerance for violence, just as our sense of beauty is deeply asymmetric. And it is this very asymmetry that simultaneously creates all beauty and pain. It takes 20 years to raise a fully functioning human and a split second to pull the trigger and end it. Empires take centuries to build and crumble in a few short years. And so it goes for beauty: hundreds of laborious hours of parenting can be rewarded by a hug, a word of kindness and connection. Weeks or months of bickering and arguing between partners, healed in one moment of true, authentic connection. Years of loneliness and unsuccessful dating attempts erased, when one meets that one special someone. In the very true sense of the word: love conquers all.
There is so much beauty… so much pain… and yet most goes unnoticed. We sleepwalk through life with our routines. Wake up, check social media on our phones, Caramel Macchiato, 15% tip, emails, team meetings, Zoom calls, more emails, microwaved lunch, yet more emails and meetings and so it goes… day after day, week after week. Few of us are present, instead routine and our subconscious carries us through the decades. The constant myopic focus on what is immediately in front of us, makes us lose the very contrast we need. We seem to have lost the ability to see the tree in the forest, the individual in the crowd. Though, it is only through contrast that we can perceive a person against the backdrop of a forest, the forest against a mountain range and the mountain range against the vastness of space on a starry night.
Living in Hawaii, I enjoy the luxury of having incredible conditions for freediving, which serves as a tremendous contrast to the busy life above the surface. Submerged under 40 ft of water holding your breath, biology takes over. The mammalian dive reflex kicks in and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution guide you. Your body instinctively knows what to do. All you have to do is let go of control. There is no system to optimize, no problem to solve… you just relax and feel your heart rate and your mind come to a crawl. All your thoughts, all your worries fade into the background until they disappear entirely. There is no to-do list, there are no deadlines or schedules. Any self criticism, perceived external expectations or stories that you tell yourself vanish by the second or third breathhold. You are neither skinny nor overweight when you are weightless. Your looks don’t matter because marine life does not judge. ISOs, RSU, FIRE rates, 401k contribution rates, promotions, career ladders, tender offers and IPOs have no meaning in a world that has no concept of “the future”. The constant scurrying and rushing above the surface ebbs away and with it the chatter in your head becomes inaudible. All you hear is “silence”.
Present in the here and now you get to observe. And what a spectacle it is, full of layers upon layers of detail. The most inconspicuous and lifeless appearing rock turns into an active stage of life, with countless performers playing their incredibly intricate parts in this wonderful, underwater ballet. Tiny seaurchins having lodged themselves in small cracks of the rock are swaying their spikes back and forth with the waves. Eels and sea snakes hiding under the rock and schools of miniscule fish circling around a coral branch that started growing on the rock, as if they were children running around a large oak tree on a vast summer field.
For me being underwater is the most effective form of meditation I have encountered. Within an hour, I am achieving a state of inner peace that was elusive to me during an entire week of sitting on a pillow in mindfulness and meditation training. It is the ultimate time dilution device. Submerge and time comes close to a standstill.
I wonder what made time stand still for Jade. Did he find inner peace? Was he content how he spent his time, or did he have regrets? I never got to ask him. He died on a Wednesday. Thinking back to the time we shared together at that startup made me wonder how I will spend the rest of my cosmic microsecond on this planet.
How will you?