This is the subtitle of a book that I have been reading (along with a million others as I do) and meditating on for weeks now. Ever since I met the author, Mark Matousek (MarkMatousek.com) back in Denver a couple months back at a conference, I just KNEW it would be a great read.

I’ve toted this book around on plane rides, to restaurants & cafes, poolside of my kids’ swim lessons, etc., and this morning to my nearby Starbucks. I’d unpacked it from my bag next to my laptop and I intended to once again, attempt to complete this blog I’d started twice and lost about When You’re Falling Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living.

But before digging in, I received a call I had been waiting for and was soon engrossed in conversation. While chatting on the phone, I heard the unmistakable labored communication of a lady behind me in conversation. Before I finished my call she gestured in a manner asking for a look at the book. Always glad to share positive information, I handed Lessons over to her with a smile without skipping a beat in my conversation. However, when I finished my call, I approached her table and she said,

I sat down at her table to chat a bit, curious about the story behind that statement.

She explained how a choking incident cut off oxygen to her brain for over 20 minutes. How she was pronounced DOA at the hospital, and comatose for 3 months during which she had 2 cardiac arrests and a stroke. After emerging from her coma, she was unable to use any of her extremities, as clearly evidenced by her labored use of such today.

“I literally bit off more than I could chew,” she said with a slight smile.

I can appreciate a good sense of humor as much as a good story. She went on to describe that fateful day which led to her life of handicap. She explained how she had been wheelchair-bound ever since for 15 years up until a couple of months ago.

“You must believe in miracles?” I asked her.

“I am a miracle,” she replied matter of factly before going into detail of her near death experience.

“Last night I dreamt I was a butterfly,” wrote the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tze. “Now am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I am a man?”

And would you believe I was lucky enough to read this essay first after the Introduction? Lessons appeals to me on so many levels, from the philosopher, to the reading of phenomenal life stories, to the cerebral person.

 “The mind that questioned itself looks forward to life,” Mark recounts in a statement made to him in an interview with Byron Katie in the essay “Questioning (Or the Sphinx)”. In this collection, names are dropped, great stories are dropped, but most importantly, wisdom is dropped. With every essay I read, viriditas was the leitmotif woven throughout the book that spoke to my soul; and quite ironically, on this day, being spoken to me by the woman who had recently escaped her wheelchair.