Ryan Lindner - The Half-Known Life

praise for

the half-known life

A GPS for life, challenging readers to examine their perspectives, motivations, tendencies, routines, and choices in order to experience each moment with greater clarity and joy. Each page will grab you by the collar and shake you into a higher consciousness.

Michael Coccari, author of Cancer Fight and Its Good to Say Thank You

As a young adult with seemingly unlimited runway, Ryan was given the gift of recognizing that life is finite and short and that its up to each of us to make the most of the time weve been given. In The Half-Known Life , Ryan shares his hard-won wisdom to encourage and challenge all of us to live life now. A beautiful and timely gift of a book.

Scott Eblin, author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, and Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative

The Half-Known Life is a great resource to help you wake yourself up and fully integrate all of you into your own life and helps us learn how to stop confirming who we are through others reactions to us. What more could we ask for? Ryan helps us learn how to courageously bring self-love to every change in our lives and how to detach from our emotions and let go to allow ourselves to make conscious choices that help us live every day deliberately in our full-known life.

Pat Obuchowski, author of Gutsy Women Win , CEO of inVisionaria, and faculty of LHH coach training

A near-death experience that inspires beyond imagination!

In... The Half-Known Life , we find highly inspiring and motivating quotes from well-known people. The author himself provides the same in the titles of his chapters, such as Becoming You: Your Relationship with Yourself. Another chapter is entitled, Your Relationship with the World. He continues to highlight Lessons from Near-Death.

Another commonality between us is that each of our near-death experiences impacts how we live life, all for the better. Should you desire to know more and find inspiration packed with motivation, I highly recommend his book!

Elinor Stutz, author of Nice Girls DO Get the Sale: Relationship Building That Gets Results , and HIRED!: How to Use Sales Techniques to Sell Yourself on Interviews

As Ryan says in this book, truly profound change happens following events that shake you to your core. Fortunately, we have gifted people like Ryan who can share such experiences and life lessons so that we can change without them. Life will always demand something significant from us. Ryan shows us how to deliver with excellence!

Ben Woodward, author of The Empowerment Paradox: Seven Vital Virtues to Turn Struggle Into Strength

The back cover of this book states that The Half-Known Life will challenge conventional thinking of success, identity and personal change. I come away with a slightly different, but related, viewpoint. The authors story challenges human thinking in general, and offers a shift in attitude and perception of this kind of thinking that can lead to great transformation, not just personal change. Without relying on religious, metaphysical, scientific, or even spiritual prompts, Ryan approached his readers, instead, with solid common sense blanketed in a poetry of words, scenarios, and explanations that resonate at the most basic level. We are so much more than we think we are!

I recommend this book for anyone who has the courage to change. It will prove to be of particular benefit to those who shy away from more orchestrated cosmologies. Pay attention to the arguments for thinking and doing things from a fresh new attitude and perspective. Ryan shows how it is from the level of elevated common sense and the changes that come with it that the potential and opportunity to change our lives once and for all can be delivered.

Linda Kolsky, author of Heavenly Hindsights: How One Mother Found Meaning in Life After the Death of Her Child

The Half-Known Life offers an insightful look into the very busy world we all live in. It encourages us to rethink what is important and provides thoughtful commentary on ways to make our lives more meaningful in the moment. Thought-provoking questions help the reader dig deep into the motives behind our feelings and actions. An engaging and relatable read that will leave you reassessing lifes priorities.

Simone Yemm, author of Stalked By Demons, Guarded By Angels

The Half-Known Life is a gift to your soul. Reading this book will not only entertain you but give you a profound sense of how to live a full life, with all the struggles that the universe throws at you. Identity, self-love, and self-mastery are just a few of the themes that Ryan tackles with grace and humor.

Andy Chaleff, author of The Wounded Healer

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know, you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

OSCAR WILDE

The Half-Known Life:

What Matters Most When Youre Running Out of Time

by Ryan Lindner

Copyright 2022 Ryan Lindner

ISBN 978-1-64663-645-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

Published by

3705 Shore Drive

Virginia Beach, VA 23455

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www.koehlerbooks.com

INTRODUCTION

Walking the Tightrope

I t was the day everything went black.

Im going down now, I said to a young woman a few seconds before the darknessmy first cardiac arrest. I knew it was coming, even if only for a few seconds. What I didnt realize was that I was just beginning a years-long journey whereby through near-constant dizziness and fatiguethe ebbs and flows of a myriad of strange symptomsI would come face-to-face with the clock of life thats wound but once.

We all have this clock, but I can always hear its tick, the ever-present reminder to manage my energy as I walk the tightrope, always a misstep away from falling into my dark world again.

When I opened my eyes after my second cardiac arrest, less than a day after the first, a ring of doctors and nurses encircled my hospital bed. Stroking my forehead, a nurse softly comforted me. Youre okay, she whispered. I still see flashes of her face.

What happened to me was a big mystery, it seemed, and in the days and weeks that followed, I tried to make sense of it. I had a random, unexplained cardiac event, and this strange mechanical device in my chest not much larger than a silver dollar was now supposed to keep me alive.

Its my first step toward becoming a cyborg, I often joked. But it was hard to trust this small, battery-operated lump bulging from my chest under another scar.

Lying in the hospital bed, I pictured my life years agothe struggle: My shirt was filthy and smelled of the pizza sauce that painted it from collar to tail. Working any job I could get, I often found myself working into the night, waiting tables, delivering pizzas, and sustaining myself on old, discarded breadsticks Id eat in my car. My shoes were held on with duct tape, although it never kept my socks from becoming soaked in the rain. That situation seemed so hopeless. Is this all my life is? Id think. Is this all I am? I held back tears.