Life After Near Death – Ten Reflections On How Almost Dying Taught Me How To Live

Shawn Maxam shares the lessons he has learned from failing to end his own life.

Shall I right the wrongs or will the wrongs write me.

-Shawn Maxam

The topics of suicide and death are still very taboo on our society. I think conversations about how short and precious life is can be very useful. I use writing about my own struggles with living and my own attempts at ending my life as catharsis. I hope you find these reflections helpful and meaningful. I do this for everyone including myself but most importanty for Shawnel.

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1. Resilience

The ability to accept epic failure and move forward.

Life is filled with incessant crisis both minor and major but we can all survive and use tragedy to learn to thrive. I will be expanding upon this idea with a post in the near future.

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2. Deliberate Self-Reflection

The practice of actively looking inward and focusing on ways to improve oneself.

Every experience presents an opportunity for introspection. We all need to engage in an honest assessment of ourselves in order to better understand how was can make our lives better.

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3. Muscular Empathy

The practice of not judging people’s past behaviors with our current knowledge.

We often do a retrograde analysis of people’s choices based upon information they didn’t have at the moment when they made their decisions. This is a mistake because true compassion isn’t conditional or based upon perfect circumstance.

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4. Healthy Behaviors

We are obsessed with our thoughts but it is more important to focus on our behaviors. It is our behaviors that affect our well-being and the people closest to us.

We are taught to think more about positive thinking and happy thoughts than to practice healthy behaviors. Other people can witness, judge and be affected by our actions whereas they can only perceive our thoughts.

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5. Emotional Maturity

Recognizing boundaries and understanding why most people have reached emotional adulthood.

Many adults tend to plateau psychologically but our emotional development should never stop. Maturity is typically based on society’s arbitrary date of physical adulthood. There is wisdom gained from aging physically and our level of emotional maturity should appropriately reflect this.

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6. Evolving Expectations

The art of changing our expectations based upon the circumstances of our experiences.

Life is amorphous. Constantly changing and evolving but yet our expectations tend to remain static. This can lead to constant disappointment. As life adapts to us we should adapt our expectations to life.

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7. Strategic Sacrifice

The willingness to engage in sacrifices that are only beneficial to all parties involved and won’t create emotional harm.

An appropriate synonym for sacrifice might be the word positive self-investment. Currently the word sacrifice has a negative connotation but we often make strategic sacrifices to accomplish our goals. As an example we invest time and financial and psychological resources to gain an education.

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8. Aggressive Happiness

The method of robustly pursuing happiness via various techniques.

Happiness can be a tangible goal if we do not measure it with materialistic metrics but instead pursue the goal of happiness with methods that themselves utilize healthy behaviors and positive thinking.

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9. Intrinsic Forgiveness:

This is the daily practice of essential forgiving yourself and others from deep within your core.

Human beings are fallible. We make mistakes. Feeling guilty about the “worse” things we have done is foolish and emotionally self-destructive. We have to forgive ourselves and other people for not being perfect.

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10. Circumstantial Patience

Patience requires constant and deliberate practice. Too much patience can be detrimental to a person’s emotional and psychological well-being while too little patience in other circumstances can be damaging to achieving long-term happiness.

The robustness of applying the virtue of patience requires nuance. Certain circumstances necessitate less patience than others. Knowing the situational differences is very important and patience is a life-long skill in need of constant development.

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