Being in the moment can save your life – Katja Hansen is an environmental engineer, water quality expert, brilliant plant-based chef, book editor, competent accountant, good mechanic, speaks four languages, does yoga every day, heads her community association, practices a holistic lifestyle, and just saved my life.
If you believe in serendipity, it happened on November 2, 2024, which marks Govardhan Puja, also known as Annakut or Bali Pratipada, which is part of the larger Diwali festival celebrated in India. Govardhan Puja is a vital part of the Diwali celebrations that emphasize themes of protection, gratitude for nature’s bounty, and communal harmony. As fate would have it, I ended up being extremely grateful that night for being protected.
We had just visited some friends who’d invited us to celebrate with them, and at the end of the evening, we were all asked to read from cards that described different ways to express gratitude. I thought to myself that this was all very quaint, but I was impatient to get out the door and get home. What came next showed how wrong I was to be so dismissive.
It’s an easy hour-long drive along a mostly divided four-lane highway that we often take to get home, and it was a dry, clear night with no wind, so good driving conditions on a moderately busy Saturday night. Not much to worry about, but I’d always cautioned Katja to pay attention, and she didn’t need my coaching because deer have a habit of bounding across this highway, so she was always alert with two hands on the wheel.
Sitting in the passenger seat, I was astonished to see the headlights coming directly towards us from around the bend on the wrong side of the highway. You hear about these things but simply don’t think about them while driving a four-lane highway. Where we used to live in Germany, there were frequent reports of “ghost drivers,” but I’d never seen one. This one was barreling silently towards us at about 70 miles per hour, which put our combined speeds at 140 mph, enough to be instantly fatal in a collision. In a mere second or two, we were on each other. There was an eerie moment of silence. No flashing lights, no horn blaring, just two lights glaring at us. In that fraction, Katja nimbly shifted the car from the passing lane into the right-hand lane, where we slipped between two cars behind and in front of us. It was all over in an instant. We were stunned but unharmed.
If I’d been at the wheel, I’m sure we’d be dead because, although I have quick reflexes, I wasn’t particularly bright that night and was thinking about other things. In other words, I was not “in the moment,” whereas she was. That singular ability to be present and alert is what saved us.
Often this is called mindfulness, and many of you reading this know that it has a great deal to do with holistic living.
Minutes before, we’d be sharing with other people what we were grateful for and how we were feeling protected. I’d thought it was a bit silly, but as we continued our drive home, it occurred to me that I’d been the silly one. Consciously being grateful and thankful for being protected is a good start to looking at life as a whole.
This is one thing that Katja takes to heart far more than I do, and so I asked myself: did her holistic lifestyle contribute to that split-second presence of mind that made the difference between life and death? Until then, I’d always been skeptical of this living-in-the-moment stuff. I’d heard that the Dalai Lama was especially good at this with people he met, always making them feel as though they were the only people in the room at that moment. But I never fully appreciated the significance until that night on the road.
One thing I admire the most about people like Katja is that they have an ability to focus on what they’re doing at a particular moment, and in so doing, they almost always do a better job of it than those of us who are busy thinking about what seem to be more important things. Many of us spend much of our lives worrying about things that we could have done better in the past and problems that might arise in the future, and in so doing, we often forget where we are in the present, which itself is often a missed opportunity. Some people call it absent-mindedness, which is an interesting term. Your mind is never absent; it’s just looking in another direction. Then you miss what’s right in front of you.
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- About the author: Douglas Mulhall’s latest book, Discovering the Nature of Longevity: Restoring the Heart and Body by Targeting Hidden Stress, explores prevention and therapies for heavy metals contamination. The American Institute of Stress recommends it and carries a Foreword by the Chief author of the American Heart Association statement on toxic heavy metals. He co-develops award-winning certifications and standards for products globally and is a registered ISO expert on a global standard for declaring the contents of products.
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