This post isn’t going to have many pictures. No charts. No illustrations. No graphs.
I’ve wanted to write something on this for some time but put it off because I couldn’t arrive, mentally, at the right approach. I knew it was out there, but couldn’t land on it. Now I think I have. And for this subject, I realized it’s best to focus on the understanding one gains, as the title suggests, rather than the thing itself.
So, Walker, You Think You’re a Contemplative Person?
I’ve always been a fairly thoughtful person — not thoughtful here in the sense of “thinking of others” but in the sense of having a contemplative nature. I had an opportunity to test this hypothesis about myself beginning in March 2022, when an unexpected lab test result was displayed on my phone after a visit to my general practitioner. But lest you think this a depressing and self-involved or self-pitying article about a medical condition, rest assured it is not.
My subject is the wisdom one can gain if one looks things squarely in the face, no matter how something is brought to your attention. The result in question was a way-too-high PSA reading. My first thought was “thank God I have good insurance!” But after that, “get moving and take care of it” was my jam.
When one has cancer of some sort, a pathology report is usually produced. It should be, in some sense, the center of your treatment over the ensuing months. Within a few days, I had mine in hand. Heather and I suffered through a report review appointment with my surgeon, during which he made a bit of a funny face. But for the time being, I had a few practical things to do, such as getting through the surgery. That, in comparison with all that followed in the next year, was the easy part. I returned to the report later, but perhaps not quite how I’d envisioned doing so.
Damn You, Estes Park!
All seemed routine in my recovery from the surgery. Heather was an absolute Godsend in helping me through it — not without a few comic moments. Fast forward two months: I noticed I’d had a fever (if you’re sleeping in your -10-degree goose down sleeping bag indoors, that’s a clue), so I knew something was wrong. But I thought it was pretty minor. It wasn’t.
Allie and I had taken a little day trip up to Estes Park, Colorado (about an hour north of Boulder) one May weekend. When I returned from Estes, I took a look at my leg and drove myself to the ER the next morning. After three or four days in the hospital and some fairly skilled diagnosis from the doctors at Boulder Community Health, they figured out roughly what had gone wrong after the surgery and what was happening. In the meantime, I went back to the pathology report and read it pretty carefully to educate myself. In plain English, it translates as “your cancer has not spread but it very well may.” So that had the effect of a few cups of coffee in waking me up and putting the whole experience in context.
“What the heck does this have to do with real estate?” you may be asking. The answer is “a lot” but bear with me.
An Attention-Getting Device
Getting tossed back into the hospital after a complication from surgery is not that unusual, but in my case the gods seemed to want to emphasize their point over the next few months, when I underwent six surgeries, most of them pretty minor, to sorta straighten things out. “What exactly am I dealing with?” grew into a question that was not terribly easy for me or my doctors to answer because things got a little trickier as time went on. Going through all that was enough to get my attention, and more importantly, enough to change my outlook.
Wisdom in a Can
The practice of real estate pivots upon very heavy interaction with people and sometimes the process of buying and selling becomes sufficiently stressful that people depart from their usual behavior patterns. I’ve witnessed it several times and I’ve learned to look at the mountains in the distance, figuratively speaking.
The whole experience having rearranged my thought patterns, I realized at a deep level that there are things worth paying attention to, and there are things worth looking past, not unlike like how we all tend to gaze at the peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park on the way into Estes. I am thankful that my experience (admittedly vaguely outlined here because the it’s not the point) gave me a quick, automatic, and pretty damn accurate sense of what matters.
I now have an ability to separate the wheat from the chaff (to use a cliche) in a way that’s very helpful in our business and keeps the boat from rocking too much. Lest you worry I endured something terrible, don’t! I didn’t. I’m ok. But coming face to face with one’s mortality provided sufficient impetus for me to accept the gift of wisdom in a can and put it to use in daily life. And for that, I am grateful.
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