August 17, 2010

• The Inception Diet.

  I fear the darkness at times.

   

  No, I do not fear death, nor do I fear the pain that will accompany it.  I simply fear the possibility that all that lies ahead is one vast, empty void that renders everything meaningful about me into nothing.

   

  Oh, I am a Christian, no doubt.  I believe that Jesus Christ died for my (our) sins and that redemption is there for those who confess and believe in the ascension, despite all the best efforts of mankind to distort His words the past couple millennia.  But I am human, after all.So I do wonder sometimes about the consequences if I am mistaken. (Then again, faith without the occasional doubt isn’t really faith, is it?  Faith, by definition, is paradoxically more active than it is passive.)

   

  So there are moments when I wonder about death without life and my skin constricts and my ears start to ring, just like they used to when, as a young child lying in bed staring at the ceiling, I would conjure up images of vampires and nuclear war.

   

  That is one of the wonders of fear—it makes the rational irrational and the irrational rational.

   

  One of the ironies about being a physician is that by now I have saved the lives of hundreds, if not yet a thousand, people—if you allow me to massage the data and use patient events rather than a simple patient count—but I cannot save my own.  Like my friend Kengi—younger and obviously more athletic than I—one day I will lay my head down to sleep and not wake up.  Whether right or wrong, early or late…it will happen.

   

  All life really boils down to is the fact that you are born, you live, those of us lucky enough are loved and love, and then we die.  There is more pomp and circumstance reserved for some than others, but you get the point.  Highlander was just a movie and Cylons do not exist.  Corporeal immortality is a joke, and the only ones who get it are not laughing.

   

  I have always waged a war with weight.  (Sing it with me: “I fought the fat and the…fat won!”)  Of course, I am not morbidly obese, neither do I need to purchase two seats when I fly Southwest Airlines, but with my penchant for reaching for all things cheeseburger and fries, I am a little more, well, cheeseburgerish in shape than I would like.  My wife has always bugged me about that, bless her heart.  But like most husbands, I found some way to take that good intention—I want you to live longer!—and convert it into some sort of irascible notion, not unlike an oversized mosquito or a hemorrhaging hemorrhoid (which, for the record, I do NOT have, thank you very much).

   

  So what does this have to do with the movie Inception?

   

  (Do not worry, there will be no major plot spoilers.  Anything I will write about the movie is located in the trailers or quickly revealed within the first 10 minutes of the movie.  I will not reveal the ending, unlike some callous people on facebook.  Ha!)

   

  Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is married and has the ability to penetrate the dreams of others.  Of course, his wife shows up in at least one of those dreams and in such dreams, the rules of time and space are altered.  What is five minutes in one dream could be five hours in another.

   

  Beyond the fact that it was brilliantly written and even more so filmed, the movie was also quite affecting.  The barometer of any movie’s success is its ability to allow each individual member of the audience to interweave the fiction with their own nonfiction, and Inception did that quite well.

   

  You see, I am one of the lucky ones that are loved and love.  And I have to be prepared to face the fact that this dream of a life is going to end one day, and if given the choice, would you not try to make the dream last as long as possible?  If sacrificing five minutes of pleasure attained by eating a cheeseburger can translate into five more hours of living the dream, then that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.  Foolish is the man who would have millions of dollars or a Nobel Prize replace the opportunity to lie next to his wife and watch her sleep—warm, comfortable and safe.

   

  So what was once a lunch littered with burgers and fries was replaced by Subway sandwiches, replaced with home lunch made from wheat bread and turkey.  (I still have not given up Diet Pepsi in favor for water and eat “bad” food on the weekends, but nobody is perfect!)

   

  I do hope and pray that at the end there will be a new light, where I can be reunited with my father, grandparents and others who went before me and I can, in turn, wait for my wife.  But if all that awaits me after I awaken from this dream is darkness, then you can be damn sure that I am going to make the dream last as long as possible.

   

  (Already down ten pounds…hopefully more soon…)

  • 4:57 am
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