LESSONS I LEARNT FROM TWO HEART SURGERIES

​I am thankful that this part of my life is finished and I can do plenty of sports again having completed my first triathlon last year, learning how to swim was a tremendous undertaking and having the right team made it so enjoyable. I am so appreciative of the women that I met setting up that 10 friends triathlon team. They have been a central part of my life in Germany and I am delighted that we could train together at the weekends as well as now currently using zoom during this Corona crisis. We have swam, ran, hiked, and had plenty of great conversations together. I am so lucky that I got to do that last year especially as this year's turn of events changed the possibility of training even though we were looking forward to possibly entering a new race. So here are the main things that I learnt from the heart surgeries and the clarity that was achieved as a result of my life being turned upside down in a flash.  

• There is always something to be grateful for - you can choose your thoughts and how you view life. I choose to wake up and be grateful for the small things. The nurses would come in and have a chat with me in my room which I was really lucky to have in the heart ward overlooking the sea in Dublin. It was like a dream and I had all the technology that I could have asked for from a few friends that visited. I watched the entire series of Stranger Things and enjoyed it. 
• There’s a routine in hospital that you fall into fairly quickly. The hospital routine is one that takes up a lot of the day including cleaning, eating, nurses checking, tablets to be taken, scans and resting, oh and sleeping… a lot while the body recovers. 
• Movement and the body creates confidence. Using your body allows you to explore the world and only when something happens to it and this is taken away do we realise how lucky we are to breathe, walk, run and climb mountains. It creates a confidence for living and joy of living life. 
• It’s important to get real about your fears and let them go. The worst thing that might have happened has just happened and it will continue until it’s finished. You can choose to make friends with your fears or fight against it. I choose to comfort myself and told myself that it was alright. 
• Your energy for putting up with bad behaviour from others will diminish and you won’t accept it especially when you are recovering. This is really tough and sometimes you need to remove yourself from certain scenarios in order to recuperate. You just do not have the energy to either 1) fight 2) flee or 3) freeze. You are simply… lacking the energy to do anything as your body heals. 
• Getting dressed will make you feel better but others will think you are back to normal faster than you are - as you start to dress normally again it can trick others into thinking that you are back to full strength even when you are not. You might be dizzy for a number of days as they rectify your tablets. 
• The most important is to try not to rely on anyone - family or otherwise - they will not be there for you when the going gets tough. You are by yourself, you are going to the hospital alone, you are looking after you and that’s all you’ve got. Family or otherwise can come meet you afterwards but it’s best to not rely on that. Everyone has lives to lead and other things to manage. When it comes to it you have to support yourself and not put the weight of those expectations on others. It is also a case of not putting the weight of these thoughts on others. They are not responsible for how you feel - YOU are responsible for how YOU feel. All that matters is how YOU feel about THEM NOT how they feel about you. There is a freedom with that and it’s knowing that you want to be with people that you feel good about. 
• Everything can change within a minute. First thing you think is that it’ll be fine, you soothe yourself into knowing that you can get through it and next thing you know you are dumbstruck. It’s as if a truck drove into your life and decided to devastate your relationships too. You find out very quickly who you want to be around in your life too. 
• Challenging times can shake your world and put it to the limits but it can come out the other side better than before. These are life’s lessons and it brings with it such clarity that you will understand what things and why things have happened along the way. There is a sequence and order to events and what happens for a reason. It all falls into place when you have time to think in the hospital bed. Thoughts like, oh if I wasn’t stressed with this then this may not have happened. I need to learn to manage stress better. Perhaps this is true but we also need to figure out those who are projecting fear onto us and increasing our stress levels to an unhealthy degree. 
• Justification of decisions is wasting energy - Trying to justify YOUR life or YOUR life decisions to anyone else is wasted energy. You can try to convince and ‘sell’ an idea about what you are doing to someone else but at the end of the day if they are fearful that you are making the wrong decision with YOUR life then there is no point in convincing them as they will think that they are right regardless. 
• Whatever happens you’ll be fine and you are stronger than you think. People have a tendency to talk to you in terms of sympathy then that is putting them a level up over you and talking down to you. It is lacking in empathy and understanding and most importantly compassion. Know that even though it’s a rough patch right now, you’ll be fine, everything works out. You have yourself for your decisions and regardless you are stronger than you think you are. 
• Love is unconditional - love does not require you to do certain things or make certain decisions to please them, no love is based on the conditional actions of others. Love that is really unconditional does not require you to do certain things. Love that is unconditional is the expression of affection towards another person. It is waking up to the person beside you and CHOOSING to be with them and also love them for their BEING, not what they do, when they do something or how they do it. Yes appreciate them for doing those things but LOVE them for BEING the way they are. 
• You come into life alone and you will die alone - one of life’s major lessons is the ability to love yourself or even like yourself when you are alone. This goes without saying that a lot of emotionally immature people find it challenging to be alone. It is something that you need to acknowledge and while certain things occur that make it challenging to sit with yourself - for instance - see post below - you cannot convince a person with depression to overcome their depression by doing this. That would not be helpful and a lot of people who suffer with this may find it worse being alone. 
• Sitting alone in solitude without distractions can heal emotional wounds faster and allowing yourself to purge any bad emotion can alleviate all the bad things that have happened. You have strengthened the mental agility and your resilience muscle. You get a clarity with solitude that can be brought about by a stillness of the mind. Once the chatter escapes and the fear projections of others leaves your mind, it is only a case of figuring out what YOUR life looks like and embracing it for all that it is. You will not only learn to heal faster but you will enjoy life more, figure out what’s important and what’s not and shed the old to make room for the new. 
• The people that were not reliable before surgery - are also not reliable after surgery. No matter what happens to you other people will not change. There is a freedom in knowing that these people will remain unchanged but you can choose how YOU interact with them. 
• Freedom - ability to make up your mind and change your mind is part of happiness. Freedom to choose and stick with that decision is part of what makes us human and what makes us feel alive. 
• Happiness isn’t about getting what we want - it’s about being happy with what you have. This might sound cheesy but things like recovery instil in me some patience that I never knew was available to me until I had to pull away from doing sport and sit in the apartment for weeks on end. I was so incredibly grateful for having what I had and I had all that I needed. 
• Patience is something that is cultivated. Patience is not something that I was all too good at growing up. My piano teacher used to say I played it too quickly. He had a ruler that he's hit my knuckles if I played too quickly and referred to me as 'speedy Gonzales' regularly. I was forever in a rush and when I was focused I had a singular ability to concentrate on a task and get it done. Your ability to be patient comes from your ability to focus on the task. I knew that I needed to be patient waiting between surgeries. Not being patient is waiting for something with an idle mind and an idle mind is the devil’s playground. I readjusted what I did and took each day step by step adapting to what my new life meant being on tablets and waiting for the next surgery. Instead of going for a run I took the time to slow things down and looked at other activities. I painted, I drew, I started looking at other ways to keep my mind active and most importantly I looked at a lot of comedy. They say laughter is the best medicine and it really is. I watched a lot of comedy and made that a central part of my life for those months. I watched/read at least one thing funny per day and laughed at life - Frankl in a Man's search for meaning states that even in the worst of times that humour can cultivate a new way of looking at pain - an objectivity to life - see post below regarding Frankl - we can learn a lot from reading and re-reading that book. 
• You can read all the books in the world about the mind but until you are truly tested then you know that your practice is worth it. I read a lot during the PhD including 'as a man thinketh' and 'a man's search for meaning' and the concepts were I guess still abstract. I had already built a strong sense of self from the time during the PhD in my life, I knew who I wanted to be and what life I wanted to construct. (Programming joke - use the constructor to construct Ali's life AliLife aliLife = new AliLife();) It goes without saying that I am human and while I tried to maintain a clear mind I sometimes slipped as stress got the better of me. Stress can make you fall into an abyss of thinking that it is never ending and only your practical mental muscles that you have trained will get you out of it. Only when the theory has been implemented into practice will these skills become one of the most important lessons to keep in your life. Sitting with discomfort, meditation, awareness and allowing yourself time to breathe means nothing on paper unless you do it practically. You need to exercise the muscle daily to prepare it to run the race. Like any sport you need to train to go on the race, if you show up to run a 10km without training, your legs will teach you the lesson the following day by not being able to walk up the stairs. So the mental muscle is the same, you need to train that muscle frequently in order for it to cope with stress - stress being analogous to a sports race. You put your body under stress when you exercise - it's the good stress, it builds muscle and grows. In this case you need to put your other muscle in your mind under stress in order for it to grow and cope with stress. Your awareness will tell you your coping mechanisms in terms of stress. Your caregivers are the ones that have provided these coping mechanisms since childhood. Such coping mechanisms can be unhealthy reactions like aggression or avoidance. It is important to become aware of them so you can calm your mind. I know when I have not engaged in exercising my mind I let automatic negative thoughts (ANTS) invade and react in ways I probably picked up from watching on t.v. It is normal that this happens as we fall into an unconscious state especially if exhausted. Raising awareness about your thoughts can allow you to figure out and focus on who you want to be. It means cultivating compassion towards yourself, allow yourself to take brain breaks, do what you can to encourage mental agility and most importantly cultivate a positive attitude which is related to the next point regarding mindset. 
• Your mindset is everything - what you think, you become - Socrates. Some may question your ability to cultivate synthetic happiness in order to stay optimistic about the future. This is synthetic but as Dan Gilbert in the video in the previous blog states - it doesn’t matter if it’s synthetic or authentic. It only comes about once you have accepted reality and acknowledged what has happened to allow yourself to move forward. Your mindset can be cultivated - it is something you can become aware of when you observe your thoughts by writing, or going for a run or being alone in stillness. You can then realise some of the ways in which your thoughts are not true and adjust them to your new line of thinking. Thoughts can play tricks on you when you are in survival mode and comforting yourself by telling yourself that you are safe can champion feelings of gratitude for your life. 

These are the main things that I have learnt in a practical way after having these two surgeries. I guess the clarity I experienced from the first one gave me such a sense of serenity that I gained a confidence in knowing that all would be alright. Life might be fleeting but we need to cherish the moments we have. It is finite and can be changed at any second. Change is the rule not the exception. We can only learn to adapt and the species that has this adaptability survives the longest. It is part of our evolution as a person. We grow up and we rely on our caretakers, we learn from them, we observe them and when we are struck down then of course we want them to reassure us like the way they did as children but we must reassure ourselves, we have flown the nest and are independent of every other human's thoughts. Having this freedom creates some responsibility that a lot of people are afraid of. It takes bravery to be vulnerable and to sit in your own pain, to address what makes you you! It also takes a certain amount of consistency and persistence to settle our 2,000,000 year old brains that are hardwired to look for fault and scan for danger. We can easily fall into an unconscious state when zombified from lack of sleep and exhaustion. We may find it difficult to get a hold of our emotions in those states especially when something is bothering us and then the true test occurs. This test is what our mental training is used for. Our training of our minds to have a stillness and clarity to approach any problem. The training can then allow us to freely choose our attitude for without the training we can fall into the despair of suffering. It is our responsibility for how we feel and it is also our responsibility to cultivate these mindsets in times of stress. That is exactly what we do for our bodies when we train them for marathons - we train them to overcome the pain and lack of motivation, we overcome ourselves and we challenge our mental state to focus on achieving the goal, so then it is equally if not more important to train our attitudes for it is the greatest of our freedoms. It is a practice to cultivate this mindset and for it to be strong and resilient, it needs to be practiced frequently. It is easily forgotten as we fall into the state of unconsciousness and adopt behaviours that we have observed. We are creatures of habit - and we need to make this also part of our habit. I have fallen into bad habits and been zombified and I know for certain that with compassion for myself in knowing that I am human, we all make mistakes and forgiveness for what happened, I can strengthen my mind in knowing that I have learnt this lesson again and Frankl says it best when he says 'Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude'.

It can happen easily that we can lose our good mindset or attitude towards life in toxic environments or think that we have lost it and give up our own power but this is within us, within our own minds and our own control. It is something that needs to be flexed like any muscle and a reminder to us all that WE choose our thoughts, WE choose our own perceptions and WE can overcome the challenges that lie before us with great fortitude and resilience for what is to come is something that is a life and life knows no bounds in terms of good or bad, only experience as we ride the waves of the ebbs and flow. We can train our minds to be flexible and adaptable like the greatest of all species that survive and I know that I survived many challenges while experiencing this time in my life. It is not only that we survive but we can thrive with the right attitude and embrace all challenges with the excitement that comes with every breath we take, every step we can walk and every kilometre that we can run and know that 'WE ARE ALIVE' and what a great privilege it is to know that and experiencing that. Embrace life for all that it is - we only have one and I LOVE MINE, I love being me, I love reading, swimming, climbing, mountains, I love the sea and smell of freshly cut grass, I love learning new things and meeting new people (when they are nice!), I love dancing, exploring and going on new adventures. I want to contribute and promote learning computers for women. I love smiling at strangers thinking that when they smile back that maybe that was the only smile they saw that day. I love watching comedy and laughing at least once a day. I love sausage dogs in particular, they are SO CUTE and melt my heart and watching videos of them running towards a camera because that is exceptionally cute and make my heart sing. I love my family. My Dad is wise and loves poetry like 'If' by Rudyard Kipling and insightful poems that would have you thinking for years. I love my sisters and home life, I love it all and would I change any of it for the world - NO. I AM ALIVE. Learn to listen to your whisper and energy flows where your attention goes. Focus on what you CAN do. You are here to experience life, how you handle it is that the journey is FUN. 

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Source: https://quotefancy.com/quote/34679/Viktor-E-Frankl-Our-greatest-freedom-is-the-freedom-to-choose-our-attitude