A wailing siren and a soft, reassuring hand. That is all I remember from my ambulance trip in suburban St. Louis during a sticky, humid summer day. My heart had stopped just as the paramedics arrived right after giving a speech. “Break a leg,” is what they tell you before going on stage. Well, I’d broken my ankle a month earlier at Gavin Newsom’s bachelor party, had a serious bacterial infection in my leg, and was on strong antibiotics due to my septic leg. What the heck was I doing on stage half a continent away from home in my condition?! This was just a symptom of my overstuffed life.
The first time I went asystolic (a word I’d never heard before), I came back from “the other side” and started telling those around me about what I saw. Over the next 90 minutes, I went flatline a few more times and had the same vision each time.
I was in a sunlight-filled Swiss chalet in a large second floor living room. A riot of light flooded the skylight and cast a kaleidoscope of colors on the walls. I was flying in the middle of this vaulted room sharing the air with a dozen small birds that were chirping their messages to me, which I miraculously understood. They told me that the world is full of awe, but I needed to “discover the pace of nature” (a marketing term we used to promote our boutique campground, Costanoa, a decade earlier).
I had wings that could transform into arms so that I could extend my hands ten feet to the floor to touch the sensuous, viscous, tropically-scented oil that was slowly moving across the dark oak floor toward the stairs where it – in a kind of Carly Simon “Anticipation” Heinz 57 ketchup commercial pace – was slowly dripping down the stairs. All of my scents were on heightened alert.
I was naked with the exception of my feet in which I was wearing two fluffy, white slippers, the left one saying “Slow” and the right one saying “Down.” Ironically, just three years earlier, we’d opened the upscale Hotel Vitale on San Francisco Bay with these slippers in every guest room.
Everything was in slow motion. It felt a little like that scene from “American Beauty” in which the melancholic teenage boy shows his girlfriend the video of the dancing plastic bag in the wind and says, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it.” But, the reality was I could take it and felt so serene and safe. That’s why it was so jarring to repeatedly come back from this time-stands-still bardo world to the sirens, the ER fluorescent lights, and the scurrying world of a medical emergency.
You may laugh and say, “Chip, it doesn’t seem like you’ve learned anything from this experience.” But, I did learn a lot. Over the next two years, I completely upended my life. I sold the business I’d founded two-dozen years earlier that I thought I would run into my 80’s. I invested more time into my adult foster son and got him out of San Quentin where he was wrongfully being held. I became single and learned how to appreciate my freedom. I spent two years after selling the boutique hotel company creating a “midlife atrium,” a time for being curious and more leisurely such that I was able to travel the world experiencing festivals and hot springs, two of my favorite hobbies. And, I got to kick back in my backyard hammock listening to Rickie Lee Jones.
It was four and a half years after that flatline experience that I jumped on the Airbnb treadmill and, years later, created the MEA merry-go-round. So, for the past dozen years, I’ve used this NDE experience as a reminder of how I once consciously curated my life to slow down and see the awe more often. This is part of the reason I try to create a couple Sundays per month in which nothing is scheduled. May not sound like much to you, but it’s a joyous sabbath for me. The good news is that these days my greatest form of awe is in the MEA classroom where I’m able to witness moral beauty in all its forms. And, that kind of experience reminds me how truly alive I am.
-Chip