One Second's Learning

From the time I lurched out of my bindings until the time that I hit the tree, I traveled about 40 feet and was in the air for just over a second. It’s crazy how much thinking you can do in one second. One second is a lot of time when you think you’re going to die. I had taken a ridiculous line, hoping to make three or four powder turns inside a copse of trees – just one way in, and one way out. As soon as my skis tangled a root on the entry, I knew I was going to slam into a tree on the copse’s other side. I had a second to think about it. My first thought was that I was deeply sad. Not sad for the dying part, though that would surely suck. But sad for the unresolved conflicts in my life - sad for the reality that I would never be able to express love and gratitude to people whom I was never going to see again. In that second, I realized, more clearly than ever, that the only thing that matters is the grace of authentic connection and gratitude for that connection: I know you, I see you, you’ve seen me and you know me. I’m so grateful for all that we have shared.

I saw faces. I remembered feelings. I felt so much love. I also felt so much self-loathing: How could I get to this place… Why did I take such a stupid line? I thought about the tangled feelings that had been in my head just before I skied into the trees, and realized the pettiness of it all. But there would be no time to right the wrongs… I thought about career and personal life, deep friendships and family. I even set goals. If I don’t die, I’d really like a second act, something that would make a bigger contribution… have a meaningful impact on more people. I thought about adult friends and college friends and my first friends. I thought about learning to swim, and sports teams I’d played on, the smell from my Mom’s courtyard, the sound of the train by my Dad’s condo. I thought about the judo class I had taken with Mr. Otta, when I was seven: A circle of second graders gathered around his feet, and Mr. Otta would walk around, pick us up by the lapels of our gis, and guide us back to the ground so that we would land on the strongest part of our back. As the weeks turned to months, Mr. Otta increased the lengths of our falls until he eventually hurled us over his shoulder. I recalled the feeling of landing well, of distributing the force of the fall through my body, of taking the impact squarely on my back.

A fraction of a second before pancaking into the tree, I flipped upside down and impacted the tree on the square of my back, like I’d been taught when I was seven years old. I broke ribs and separated vertebrae and bruised my spleen, but I walked away. I lived. A month later I wrote to my home-town newspaper to tell them what I’d learned, and how it saved my life. They linked me back to Mr. Otta’s obituary, written just a few months earlier, which begins:

Fundamental to both judo and aikido is the art of the fall. During Kenji Otta’s 52 years as Goleta’s premier sensei in both martial arts, he taught more than 10,000 students how to fall gently, safely, and, above all, confidently.

So, a big thank you to Mr. Otta!

… And big love to the people who’ve filled my heart and reminded me at every juncture how special, how beautiful conscious engagement is. The opportunity to experience the world and reflect on meaning and engage in laughter and love and drama and pain and kindness – what an incredible gift it all is: sentience.

In the second that I traversed the empty space inside the copse of trees I thought about the people who were present at moments of heightened awareness – the teachers and mentors and guides who ribbed me and gave me permission and accompanied me through challenges and epiphanies, and who helped me to make sense of it all. I would be lying if I wrote that it was clear to me what I’d want to do post-crash (if I would be so lucky as to have a life post-crash). But in the years since I’ve thought heavily on the opportunity to have a second chance, to do something kinder, more generous, more thoughtful. And I can see no greater good than to celebrate, be among and invest in the work-worlds of the guides – the people who help us to see the best that we have in ourselves. And so this enterprise is dedicated to the best people out there, the Ken Ottas and the people who help others navigate the treacherous mine fields along the pathway of self discovery.