To Make the Most of it All

When I met Bert, it changed my life. He wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met. Bert was a happening; a lanky, excited, brilliant, energetic, ridiculously talented yet astoundingly humble man. He was 6 feet, 140 pounds of LIFE.

He wasn’t the kind of person who counted his days, his money, or even his guitars (13, last we counted together years ago). In his early 30s when I met him, with the brutal cystic fibrosis affecting but never defining his experience, he willed his mark on this world not simply with his extraordinary gifts, but with his decision simply to make the most of his time here. And that, he certainly did.

His academic and scientific accomplishments were notable, including an impressive career at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, the highlights of which can be found here.

But to me he was my band brother. We wrote and performed music together for nearly a decade in garages, festivals and smoky bars. We ate pre-gig dinners with our other band mates and went to 24-hour breakfast spots afterward, dragging our weary bodies home at 3am. Why? Because we all wanted to share as much of what was special between us for as long as we could. We hauled our equipment around to familiar and new drinking holes, met hundreds of people who came just to see us and share our thing and gave a fun night to hundreds more who will never remember us. We played nearly every place in the Tri Valley that booked bands (remember Union Jack and Haps back when it was a dive bar?) and dozens more in the Silicon Valley. And we had a blast.

We stretched our families’ patience to (and in some cases past) the breaking point for our little weekend rock-fests, even though we all had “real” lives and real jobs. We did it because squeezing onto those tiny little bar stages (and sometimes just squished in the most convenient corner of the club) and slamming out our tunes was more than living a few hours like a rock star. It was our way of celebrating LIFE - that beautiful, messy, fleeting, unpredictable path we all trek, but often don’t fully appreciate.

But Bert did. Every moment of every day, his example for me was a lesson in seeing through all the garbage and self-imposed suffering from our ideas about what we should be doing, how we think we should be doing it and what we worry other people might think about our choices.

Saturday, at his celebration of life ceremony, my other surviving band mates and I will play and sing along with him one more time, to this song he wrote, sang and absolutely slayed on the guitar. And I will be grateful for him, once again.

Please remember that neither your body, nor your time here is meant to last forever. So, like Bert, please make the most of it.

Dan Taylor, ACE, NASM-CPT, is owner and head trainer at Pleasanton-based Tri Valley Trainer. They provide personal training and small group fitness solutions at their studio and an innovative, medically endorsed web-based group healthy eating coaching program.