"If you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to go a little further..."I was shaving today. Pretty quickly too. I do that often…. one gets into a routine and a pattern, it becomes subconscious, and the fact that I carelessly take chances with 6 tightly-aligned parallel razor blades on my face is frightening to consciously consider. On rare occasion, I’ve paid a price. And damn, an earlobe can really bleed out.
I did fine this time around. No cuts. But, while scraping quickly and with consciousness, I thought about these risks, my assumptions with routine, and my own experiences with an occasional error in judgment or timing… and then I went back in time, as it were…. I went back in my mind, to a time in our history of straight razors and isolation, and I thought, “I wonder if anybody ever died from shaving"...
Of course they did. Think about it. 1800’s, the prairies, isolation, somebody with a straight edge and a metal tin mug with a soap cake and a horsehair brush… imagine that he shaves and unintentionally cut himself, deep. With or without a family or friend at his side, as the circumstances play out and as his life bleeds out, as his consciousness fades, perhaps he anticipates coming to, perhaps he expects to survive... perhaps… and then he dies. Boom. Gone. Like that.
A good friend, Steve Hill, wrote an amazing book about his own family’s history. True shit, serious shit, stunning shit. Stories including deaths and near deaths, all the way from snake bites, friends lost in wars, and the grueling story of his own great, great grandfather being treated for tuberculoses by a severely drunk doctor in a dank hotel room above a small town saloon, where he bled out after being punctured through both lungs with an ice pick as that doctor’s failed attempt to drain the fluid from his lungs, the result of a severe and rampantly violate outbreak of influenza, in a time before we had all the modern options we have available today to manage such situations.
Look at how good you have it. And not even as far as history goes, but even in our own time, Do we work in sweatshops? Sit without food for days in hot famine infested regions, covered with flies? Do we live in ‘industrialized manufacturing cities’ where we live in constrained capacities, squeezed into worker dorms, working 16 hours shifts for just enough money to pay for our food and accommodations without ever having the means to leave that region? Do we live in rampant pollution and contamination that cuts our life expectancy in half? Are we forced to live in makeshift homes or buildings which easily crumb and collapse around us when an earthquake strikes? Or when a bomb does? Do we live in truly constant fear within war-torn regions, fear of assault, rape, murder, or all three? Are we slaves, traded and use for sex or labor against our will at the hands of a faction of dictators without moral consideration of you, as an individual with love and pain and emotions, dreams, family and more?
Comparatively speaking we should not just be happy to be alive, but to be living the lives most of you reading this live. The things we take for granted, sometimes, are hard to justify when you look beyond your own limited circumstances.
Matt told me the true story once about a guy who, in a moment within some idiot argument with his girlfriend or wife, smashed something glass like a shower door, which ended up cutting his upper arm deeply on the inside, where all the serious veins are. In a similar fashion as the others mentioned here, he bled out. And died. As his girlfriend sobbed over him, trying to stop the blood loss while waiting for an ambulance. In minutes, he was gone. Gone. Over some stupid fucking argument, and an unnecessary moment of frustration that resulted in a physical outburst with no intention or expectation of the price he would pay for it being his life.
We snicker at the mention and stories of “Darwin” award winners, seldom allowing for the idea that they might have been thinking something we have thought ourselves, moments before something we did with success, as to how whatever thing we were about to do might be awesome to look back on later or tell our kids about or post to facebook when we got home.
When that guy cut his throat shaving or the relative got fatally stabbed by the inebriated physician, or when the guy was on the floor with his girlfriend realizing he’d hurt himself badly doing something out of anger... when all these things happened and their eyes fluttered, did they know they’d not open them again? Or did they think, like in the movies, they’d open them again some abstract time later to find a doctor, family and friends standing over his hospital bed saying “Man we almost lost you”.
They end up being who the neighbors talk about the next day at the coffee shop, or the subject of an “I saw this horrible accident today’ conversation moments before a conference call starts, or the name you hear at end of the sentence muttered but an acquaintance you inadvertently bump into who says “Did you hear what happened to ….”.
People lose people every day. We likely have our own near-death stories. I do. I have a few I know of and likely 10 more I don’t realize would qualify. The fact that nobody has “lost YOU” yet is the luck of your timing, location, and circumstances. It’s pure luck. It’s not fate or destiny or God… it’s just that you have not made the specific mistake or acted on the wrong momentary impulse or been in the wrong place at the wrong time… yet.
We are all ‘near death’ story-tellers simply because we are all still alive. We’re just not recognizing how near “near” was. And is.
That you are still alive is an amazingly good fortune. You need to keep that in mind. Always. Because as bad as the "worst day ever" might seem, it could be a day you look back at, on the last day and in that last moment, wanting the chance to live over again.
I have no rights to bitch or complain in the least about anything. If I’m in the 1% compared to the global powers and influencers, I still have got to easily be in the top 10% of people that the other 90% could rightly say don’t know shit about struggle and stress.
There’s a powerful scene in the opening of “Saving Private Ryan” that comes to mind. As the troops are storming the beaches, being shot relentlessly, a soldier standing up has his helmet knocked off by the force of a bullet that would have otherwise gone straight through his skull. As it happens he chuckles out of disbelieve at how lucky he was to have been spared as a second bullet cuts through his skull just a moment or two after the first shot failed.
We are all that guy. We have either not been hit, we’ve been spared, or we’re not aware of what’s possibly going to hit us next. And once it does, we will be the person those whose luck has not yet run out talk about the next day.
Live in gratitude. Seriously. You are alive, and able to continue living, for now, so do. While you can. Because it’ll be gone before you know it.
“Get busy living, or get busy dying. God damn right.”