Flatline

-Devlyn Steele

Beep beep beep beep...beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

"Code blue code blue code blue, we have a code blue get the crash cart in here!!!"

Watch enough TV and you will see a hospital scene where the heart monitor goes flat and the medical staff yells code blue and for a crash cart. Code blue is the term generally used to indicate that a patient is in need of immediate resuscitation. The common cause is cardiac arrest.  The next scene will be the crash cart rushing in, the shirt of the patient being ripped open and then the defibrillator pads being placed on the patients chest. Then one medical person will yell "charging to____" and another yelling "clear" as they send an electronic pulse through the patient to hopefully restart the heart.

Although this is not a laughing mater and truly an emergency, I envy the medical personal in this situation. Why? There is a clear indication of what is going on, the heart monitor going flat, and there is also a clear procedure of what to do. True, if things don't go well the patient dies, so it is a critical situation. Still, it is nice to know what is happening and what to do.  After all, if the heart monitor goes flat, you don't start to examine a person's feet, or hands, or liver, or the other endless parts of a human body. You also don't respond by giving medicine for other body parts either. You know what is happening and you know what to do.

I see people all day long that are flat lining in one area of their life or another. They are depressed, upset, unhappy, anxious and sad. You do not have a heart monitor to tell you clearly what is the cause. You have to probe what can be a very unreliable source, what a person tells you. Then you have to apply cures that work differently on different individuals. Even worse than that, for the cure to work, you once again are relying on a very unreliable source for it to work, a person taking action. 

Suppose we had a heart monitor that could monitor areas of our life, what would it be saying? Is your health, weight and physical life in danger? How about your relationships and romance, are any suffering skimped heart beeps. Is your career ready to flatline? Are you finances in cardiac arrest? If we could have a machine to monitor the health of the areas of our life, what would it be telling us?

Here is the thing about monitors like a heart monitor, they are only effective if someone is monitoring them.  If no one is there to see what the monitor says, then no one can use the information to take action. The truth is that we do have monitors to see what is happening in our lives, but we work hard to make sure that we do not see what the gauges are saying.

In order to prevent going into a code blue emergency state in our lives we have to become conscious and ask ourselves two questions,  "What is going on and then what action should we take?" Right now if you were to turn on your monitor/consciousness and examine your life, what are the gauges saying?

The irony is that we complain about many things in our life, and complaints are really one of the gauges that indicate areas of our life that we need to take action. The very areas we complain about, we know how to fix and yet we do nothing. Complaints are telling us that there is an area of our life not going well and just like the medical staff, the truth is we know what to do. Imagine if medical staff did not respond to gauges going off, we would think them irresponsible and yet we do the same each day.

We complain about our weight and we know what to do, but do we exercise more or develop a healthy eating style? We complain about our job, but do we put our resume together and look for a new job, or get more education or training? We complain about our finances, but do we change our spending habits (is that $3. coffee that important?) or put effort into making more money. We complain and complain and then complain some more about our relationship, and yet do we turn off the TV and spend more time communicating and doing things to promote a better relationship?

If we turn on the monitors of our life, our consciousness we can see what the gauges are saying and we can take action and prevent an area of our life going into cardiac arrest. Unlike using a defibrillator, when an area of our life flat lines, it is not that easy to restart. A relationship and other areas of life, if not monitored, can go beyond restarting. So avoid going into cardiac arrest and monitor the gauges in your life and take the action you need to today.