Benjamin Button?

There‘s every chance my heart stopped in the accident and the person giving CPR got me back going.

If so, I was sort-of dead.

My recovering is therefore a bit of a Benjamin Button moment. Every day I get a little more like a person my current age. At the start I was dead. Then I was lying in bed with full care. Then I was recovering, just able to get out of bed. Eight weeks on, I still wake up sore and achey. I‘m told that what‘s getting old feels like.

I can‘t wait to get back to feeling my usual age, and then staying there as long as possible.

The bigger the city

A business school friend of mine who grew up in a small town in Germany once told me, upon response that i was moving to London, that „the bigger the city, the lonlier you are“.

I‘ve been lucky that since moving to London 6+ years that has not been explicitly the case. I‘ve been fortunate to know a good number of people in London (it was one of the key reasons for leaving Frankfurt for London) and met many more along the way. My key issue in my social life is i‘m never in London - i’m constantly travelling for work. But that‘s a whole other story!

Since the accident and wearing a halo brace i‘ve been fascinated by the level of attention i have / have not received. I‘m far from inconspicuous. Yet - many people don‘t even look, drop eye contact once caught looking or simply don‘t ask what happened or i‘m ok or need help. Children are an exception - they will stare and usually ask their parents what happened. On the tube few people actively offer a seat.

This is a big city phenomenon. Interesting it is a phenomenon that attracts people to big cities. I have heard in my circle of friends the term „anonymity“ mentioned a few times. People choose to live in big cities to be anonymous - to walk down the street not being seen, to not be interrupted at a restaurant, to feel they are not judged and can do as they feel. Small fish in a big pond. We all know those people and we also know those who are the opposite - they like being the big fish in a small pond.

To be clear i‘m not seeking attention!

Outside of friends and family i‘ve only been asked 9-10 times if i‘m ok or „what happened?“. The last one, just moments ago out the front of a busy Farringdon Station on a beautiful autumn‘s day, was a retired nurse from Melbourne. Of all places, she‘d worked in the Women‘s and Children Hospital in Melbourne in the spinal care ward. A typical nosey nurse or someone just used to a small community of medicos or someone used smaller sized city? Who knows. But it was a lovely chat - to hear about her double bipass and mechanical heart valve implants, her victory over breast cancer and her recent fall smashing her wrists.

Stopping to say to every person you meet on your way to a meeting in any reasonably sized town let alone city would be highly inefficient. However, it is a gesture of human connection that adds to the rich tapestry of our lives that i argue here can happen in a big city or small one by simply learning when is appropriate and then actively asking people how they are or if they need help or what happened. Especially in a world when everyone i glued to their ~6.1 inch appendage that dominates day to day.

 Can our EQs develop to handle this human connection in big as well as small cities? With some awareness and a little less self centricity perhaps its possible and we‘ll all be better for it.

To be or not to be

Someone said to me once „only boring people get bored“. That statement has been bouncing around in my head for the past few weeks as I put myself squarely in the slow lane to recover. See The Tumble

Of course, recovering from a C-spine injury needs to happen at its own pace and in the context of the person. In my case, I was very fit and active at the time. Life was moving fast - we were preparing for a wedding, I was commuting to Johannesburg for work almost every week, I was building a bank from scratch, I was doing bike tours each weekend and we were trying to spend time with our friends across Europe. It was busy. You could argue it was too much.

I have gone from that pace of life to sleeping 8-10 hours each night, a coffee walk to The Elgin, napping during the day, reading (Calypso and Harry Potter!), watching Netflix (Fauda has been great!) and enjoying the companionship of visitors (thank you for taking the time out to visit!). That is a full day for me, now. One I get to enjoy for the time being.

But even then it is too easy to spend 1-2 hours mindlessly scrolling Facebook, Instragram and the news for some little dopamine hit. Sometimes I crave a little more of a hit and sneak a look at my work emails, heaven forbid. We have tuned our brains for constant stimulation. I think that divides us into two groups - one that creates and one that consumes. I am sad that I feel I‘ve largely fallen on the ‚wrong‘ side of that. I say ‚wrong‘ because I aspire to be more of a creator using consumption as inspiration. Today I feel I consume far to much.

One activity I‘ve not mentioned so far is taking (long overdue) French lessons. As I write it occurs to me that language is of course the medium that facilitates the creation and consumption. Spoken language is one medium vs art or otherwise. I‘m very much enjoying studying the French language at the moment. Être ou ne pas être.

I think you have a choice whether to keep your self suitably busy when in recovery or not. That may need outside stimulus or training ahead of time. I see it important - just as important as the physical/physiological recovery is the mental/psychological recovery. I‘m testing whether creation is a better way to recover than consumption! So, I choose to be / être, at least for the moment.