“To bring an end to our Fourth Annual Writers’ Summit, I would request our chief guest Mike Hastings to come upon the stage and share with you all, his final tip of inspiration for today.”
Mike Hastings. That name echoed in his head. Just as tiny bits of things make a pile, tiny bits of sufferings, tiny bits of regrets and tiny bits of defeats, all added up by a final tiny bit of dangling hope makes a human being.
“But what made Mike Hastings, The Mike Hastings?” His eyes twinkled.
“Just those tiny bits of life long lessons, he will carry to his grave.” He smiled to himself.
He let his mind slip once again in the deep, dark abyss called his past. It drifted, skipping through scenes and halted at one. He took a deep breath, as if he was still there struggling with the breaks, as his car raced towards the dead end. Everything had changed in an instant. He could see the road yawing out of view and hear the music on the radio dying away, as the car careened off the highway, arcing upwards into the air. He felt a sense of flight, of weightlessness, followed by ceaseless darkness.
When consciousness came back, he recalled the paramedics struggling for what felt like hours to free him from that coffin like confinement of his wrecked car and just before swaying back in to the deep unconsciousness; he remembered lying there with his bloodied body looking up at the moonlight sky, which had thin scatter of stars piercing like jewels through it. All his life had flashed back in front of his eyes then. How his mother left him with a drunk father, who called him useless. How tongue tied he used to be when the guys at school bullied him. How the first love of his life had left him over someone else. How all this made him gave up on his life and how it had contaminated his thoughts with self-loathing. This accident was a perfect metaphor for his life at that point: a journey down a dark road, a sharp turn, utter loss of control. But lying there, instead of feeling relieved that death was on its way, he had whispered: “Please! I am not ready.”
The next thing he could remember were lights flashing over him as he was being rushed to the operation theatre. In that moment, somebody had squeezed his hand and whispered: “stay strong!” The next moment he felt densely heavy as his entire body could not physically move or vocally respond, but he could hear every whisper, word, cry, and scream that pierced through his ears asking him to wake up. He heard them all amplified ten or twenty times, sometimes accompanied with echoes.
And in that moment hanging in mid-air, clinging to something called life, while the deathly gravity was pulling him down, he thought about life. How he had taken a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around him and called that handful of sand the world. Indeed, he had been the architect of his own unhappiness. It was then that he saw how busy he had been dying every day, that when death dared to come close he regretted and said: “Oh how can I forget to live”.
Mike stepped up the podium to address the audience. This Mike was not the depressed, self-doubting recluse who pushed everyone away for fear of being hurt again, but this Mike was the one who woke after three weeks in coma, confident and opened to the more abundant, colorful, and awe-inspiring world. This new Mike was determined to live.
“Ladies and gentlemen, here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.” He finally said, letting out a deep sigh, as he felt life breathe back into him.
