Transcript

What day of the week is someday?: Todd Reubold at TEDxUMN

Thank [Music] [Music] you. Isn't it interesting how sometimes we learn the most about ourselves in life's darkest moments? At 6:04 p.m. on August 1st, 2007, I was outside playing tennis at the University of Minnesota on a beautiful summer evening. But then the next minute at 6:05 p.m., all hell broke loose. First, we heard this enormous explosion, and then we saw black smoke rising in the sky to the southwest. The next minute, emergency vehicles were racing down the street in front of me with sirens blaring. The Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis had just collapsed. Knowing that most of my family traveled that bridge on nearly a daily basis, I grabbed my belongings and I raced the seven blocks to my parents house. When I got there, both my mom and dad were watching the news, but I could tell that something was wrong. My mom looked like she had just seen a ghost. She told me a few minutes later that she had been on that bridge just minutes before it went down. and I could tell that she was still visibly shaken by that experience. The next day, I had to fly overseas. So, my mom offered to drop me off at the light rail downtown to catch the train to the airport. And when I got out of the car, I'll never forget this moment that just as before I closed the door, I turned to her and I said, "I love you, Mom. I'll see you soon." And she just looked back at me with this blank stare. Didn't say a word. And I closed that door. I watched her drive away. And that was the last time that I saw my mom alive. Because that night, as I flew across the ocean, completely unaware of what was happening, my mom was rushed unresponsive to the hospital emergency room. The next day, when I arrived overseas, there was a message from my sister. Urgent. Call home now. As soon as I got a hold of her, she told me the news. A blood vessel had burst in her mom's brain, an aneurysm. She was still in the hospital, unconscious, and there was nothing more the doctors could do. As soon as she said those last few words, I felt my knees buckle and I just collapsed to the floor. And in that moment, everything in my life just stopped. Later, when I walked outside, it was like the whole world had changed. The sunlight looked different. People were moving all around, but to me, they were just a blur. Here I was, trapped halfway around the world with no chance of getting home that night while my mom lied dying in a hospital bed on the other side of the globe. Nothing in life can prepare us for these moments. Later around 2 3 in the morning, I got the call from my sister that our mom had died. Now, I know that the collapse of the bridge didn't cause my mom's death. And I still feel horrible for those that lost their lives that day, but to me, those two will always be connected. And I'll always wonder if the stress of that near miss ultimately caused the tragedy and her death. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, I went through the five stages of grief we've all heard about. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But I kept coming back to a sixth, more powerful feeling. One that no one ever told me about. I just felt so calm. It was like all the things that I thought mattered in the world, work, promotions, none of that mattered anymore. So here I had this incredible sense of grief like I'd never experienced mixed with the greatest sense of calm that I'd ever felt in my life. Now death is unfortunately nothing new in the human experience. We all have or will lose loved ones at one point or another. And in those moments that experience is uniquely our own. So for me it was that feeling of calm but that was soon replaced by the stress and the rush of everyday life as real world came back to to me. But then more tragedy struck unfortunately. Our dog Jasper, my best friend in the world, was diagnosed with cancer. Over the course of a year, we would do and try everything we could to bring him comfort and to keep him alive. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. I spent more time in veterinary waiting rooms than I care to remember and nothing was working. All we could do is sit and wait and watch. And the watching was the worst part as the cancer overtook his life. Now, some of you might be sitting there thinking, "He's just a dog. What's the big deal?" But to me, he was way more than just a dog. He was my best friend in the world. There through the highest highs and lowest lows for nine years. And I loved that dog as much as I've loved anyone else in this world. Something happened towards the end of Jasper's life, though. Despite the pain that I was feeling and knowing that he was going to die, I changed the course of my life. Together with my wife and both of our dogs, we started to go places and do things we'd always talked about doing. A road trip to the Black Hills with two dogs. Let's do it. And each time we kept coming back to the same two questions. Why haven't we done this before? What have we been waiting for? In the end, unfortunately, Jasper did lose his battle with cancer. And the night that we had to put him to sleep was one of the saddest days of my life. But I realized something in the days that followed was that there were moments in the last days of his life and in the last months of his life that were among the best moments of my life. And I wondered what had happened. What was going on here? And then it hit me. I had been living my life with intent. I had been fully alive in those moments. I was no longer a passenger in a car watching life go by. I was living completely in those moments with Jasper. So I decided to step back and take a look at the rest of my life and ask a few questions like why am I spending most of my year 2200 hours sitting in front of a computer but only 50 hours hiking when I'd much rather be outside? or why am I spending most of my year sifting through 15,000 emails but only taking 1500 photos when photography is what I love? And I realized something else that I had been alive for nearly 15,000 days. And if each one of those days was a penny, it'd be twice as many pennies as are in this jar. And I asked myself, why did so many of those days all look the same like these pennies? Why wasn't I out there making more of those days? Why weren't they the best days of my life? And then it came to me, we all have these lists of things we'll do someday, like someday I'll sail the Caribbean or someday I'll be a better chef or someday I'll climb that mountain. and I decided to stop waiting for someday. So on a cold winter's afternoon, I sat down at the kitchen table, took out my computer, and just started typing a list. 40 things I wanted to do before my next birthday. Some things big, some things small. Some things I always wanted to do, and some things I just wanted to do again because they were so much fun. And on that day, the 40 by 40 list was born. Now, I've done this before, and I'm sure many of you have, too, where we take out a journal or a notebook, and we just start writing a list of our goals and our dreams, and then what happens? We put that up on a shelf, we put it in a drawer, and we just forget about it. We go back to our daily lives. But this time, this time was different. I printed out the list and I put it on the refrigerator so that I would see it each and every day. And then I shared the list first with family and friends and then I started a blog and shared it with whoever wanted to follow along. And guess what? It turned out to be one of the best years of my life. So I'll just share a few of those stories with you here. I spent a day hiking through the mountains with my wife. Hiking to the top of a really steep mountain, something that I'd always dreamed of doing someday. There were smaller things, too. I went to a water slide park with my nephews for a day. Something I loved doing when I was their age. And I learned a very valuable lesson that day. When you're going really fast down a steep water slide that has a cover, it's a bad idea to put your hand up to try and slow yourself down because that really hurts. Some of the things I just did by myself. I always wanted to just disappear for a weekend, throw a dart at the map, and just start driving. So, I did that with my dog Zoe and we ended up in Iowa, which was way more cool than it sounds because while there, we saw things and we did things that I never would have experienced just sitting at home. One night driving along the road, I pulled over, got out next to a corn field, no one around for miles, and just stood there in awe of the sunset, completely alive. In that moment, I also through this this experience of losing loved ones realized that when we lose those loved ones, we lose their stories. And so I didn't want this to happen with my dad. I always thought someday we'll make a family history video. So we sat down and we did that together. And then also as we go through the rush of our daily lives, sometimes we forget it's the people that matter the most, the loved ones in our lives. So my sister and I got together, went to New Mexico for a long weekend, hiking through canyons, and reconnecting with that silly sense of humor that only siblings can understand. But not everything on the list was successful. There were definitely failures along the way. I really wanted to be better at meditation. And every time I'd close my eyes, I'd fall asleep, which made me realize more than meditation, I just need to sleep a little bit more. Another discovery throughout this year was that when you share a list like this, when you share your goals and your dreams with others, people want to help. Sometimes people you don't even know will want to help you. I really wanted to go water skiing, something that I had done 20 years ago when I was a kid. And you would think that would be pretty easy in the land of 10,000 lakes and 10 times as many boats. But I was having such trouble with this one. But then my neighbor's old sister's sister said, "We've got a boat. Come on out with us." And so I spent a day with complete strangers doing something that I loved to do when I was a kid. Now, I know some of you are probably sitting there thinking,"I can't do all this because of school or work or money or whatever it might be." Really? I mean, seriously, what are you waiting for? That magical someday. I think the problem is that we often hear about the latest Oscar-winning actress or person who summits Mount Everest and we say, "I could never do something so grand." So, instead of doing something, we do nothing. I mean, driving to Iowa is not as sexy as rafting down the Nile River, but it's not about doing something grand. It's about doing something meaningful, something that matters to you, no matter how big or small that might be. So, remember that jar of pennies from before? I don't care about that because that's the that's the past. I can't change the past and I don't know how many more pennies I'm going to have in that suitcase. So, I'm not worried about the future. You know what I am worried about? What I'm the most interested in is this penny right here. Because this penny represents this moment and this day and this time I have to spend with the loved ones I have right now. So if there's one thing you remember from this talk, one idea worth spreading, I hope it's this. Stop waiting for someday because someday might never come. Thank you.