Don Kowalewski
Writer. Ad Sales and Marketing. Social Media Content Creator. Aeropress Coffee. Makes the best salsa in the world.
Things I Love: Vacation, Injury Free
My 9-day vacation holds many memories, but the thing I’m freaked out about was the second to last day and how I nearly broke my neck – and I’m not even kidding. I Tweeted about this briefly, but I keep replaying the moment back in my mind and …phew …it could’ve been really, really bad. I felt and heard my neck crack and fold backwards.
How, you ask?
My daughter and I were on the sandbar, in less than 3 feet of water. Do you see where this is going? She was doing underwater somersaults. An 8-year-old can easily do an underwater somersault in 3-feet of water because an 8-year-old girl weighs next to nothing and can gently roll forward or backward and flip around in the water. I, however, am 38 years old and even with my short 5’4″ frame, in 3-feet of water (it might’ve been less), there’s not much room for error. Plus, as a 38-year-old, I don’t do many underwater somersaults anymore, so I tried to give myself a little jump start and sorta half-dove into what would’ve been a pretty nice somersault …had I been in 5 feet of water. In 3-feet of water, this half-dive resembles an ACTUAL dive and I essentially jammed myself face (head) first into the sand and ate a mouthful of sand as the rest of my body kept going in the general direction of a somersault …but my head was planted in the sand.
It all happened in an instant and as I sit here, 72 hours later, I feel like I dodged a bullet and my neck feels like I was in a pretty bad car accident.
It might seem odd to start the first blog entry following my vacation as a message about a near life-altering mistake that’s tormenting me, and I always come back from vacations with thoughts of changing my life and using it as a new jumping off point, but all these years later and all these vacations later, nothing’s changed.
Maybe I’m being overdramatic, but this is a vacation-lesson that will stick with me (at least the neck soreness will still linger for a few days). I’m reading “4-Hour Workweek” and doing “4-Hour Body.” I’m in the process of convincing myself I can have a career and then 2 or 3 passive sources of income, and that I can have six-pack abs. I will stop taking unnecessary risks with few rewards (like diving off the ends of docks or doing underwater somersaults in shallow water). How many times can I expect to do dumb stuff and avoid catastrophe? I need to eat better. Sleep more. Stop thinking about what I might, could, and should do …and start doing it.
I can’t do underwater stunts. With my lung thing, I shouldn’t ever really do more than a 5K and I should just enjoy the running (versus pushing myself to the brink of collapse just so I can boast I can run a mile in under 8-minutes …which is a weak thing to boast, anyway).
Anyway …that’s the biggest thing that happened to me on my vacation. I’ll have lots of pictures of sandcastles and whatnot, and I’ll try and journal the wonderful week and talk about making home movies and making memories. But for a moment, my vacation has given me reason to reflect …and refocus. May it not take a near tragic neck injury the next time.
Don Kowalewski 
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