RE: Oder of Death
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
I see.
Was it recently that you fought death or an older episode of your life?
I would perhaps not formulate that the more horribly someone treats you, the more you learn, but rather the more straightforwardly and without embellishment someone does it. With this person you can recognise that he or she has weaknesses of their own that are visible behind e.g. the anger. A form of helplessness ... perplexity. At least that's how I feel.
I should be least concerned with people who display psychological dodginess and obsession, because they don't actually speak to me and lack understanding of their own faults. A strange fascination emanates from them, however, because between the confused there is often a captivating view of the defectiveness of those they target. To put it biblically: none of us could cast the first stone, could we? So these confusingly apt statements of the possessed about others often have a kernel of truth, which, however, remains confined to them, but does not reflect back to themselves.
I never thought I'd make 18. I repeatedly sidestepped sudden death throughout my childhood, so much that I actually gave it thought and decided I'd better live as hard as I could before I died. This proved to be rather ill advised, but, hey, I was a kid. From wrecking motorcycles, swamping boats, and leaping out of trees on purpose, Alaska proved luck outweighs reason in my youth. In my later teens, driving a forklift off a dock, a car with no brakes off a cliff, and more boating tricks, the doubt I'd survive to majority was reinforced almost monthly.
I have maintained the good luck required to keep all my digits attached and limbs functional all my life, despite stepping out of the way of certain death at the last minute regularly. Then I had a heart attack a couple years ago, and again cheated death by chasing down the ambulance on foot when they drove right past my house, making it to an airport for life flight out of town because the airport here was flooded that night, and managing not to mess up the surgery when I woke up in the middle of it, yet was working 70 hours a week 1 week later.
One of these days I'll fall under a bus, eat a bullet, or something. Luck can't carry a guy forever.
I note that I never learn from being lucky, either. Well, that's not entirely true. I fell off a second story and bounced pretty hard ~10 years ago, and the next day I had a harness, so even lucky bounces can teach you something. However, it is the more painful experiences we are motivated not to repeat, and that is what I mean when I say the worse I have been treated the more I have learned, because there is no pain worse than pain you should have avoided by learning from past mistakes.
I am incapable of rectifying others' behaviours or views, and it has taken intolerable anguish to finally learn this definitively. I undertake to not be dependent on another's actions for my well-being, because I can chastise me or pay the price for ill-considered adventures I foolishly undertake, but wives and bosses not so easily when they volunteer me for them. Stoning others for their sins never cures wounds I bear as a result of those sins, so I don't seek to regardless of whether I am righteous enough to even consider it. Not only is it laughable for me to consider me some kind of moral authority, unless I can prevent the commission of crimes by doing so, stoning anyone else neither does me nor anyone any good.
I spend none of my limited attention on thoughts of revenge.
Better that I figure out how I got harmed and set boundaries that will keep it from ever happening again.
Thank you for this insight into your daring life. I wonder how you got the idea that you wouldn't turn 18.
I felt very entertained and the dramatic description of especially your last event, that you went after the ambulance and were taken to the hospital in the plane, as well as the awakening on the operating table are pretty stark, but so are all the others:)
Since you didn't actually die, all those experiences where you narrowly escaped death or serious injury are the salt in the soup of your experiences. I think people love risk as much as they loathe it. I call the one urge innate, the other instilled. For one more, for the other less. Your parents have certainly been through a lot with you! How do you tell such stories within the family? Are they part of a tradition?
I come from a large family and my parents were both good storytellers and have survived their own near-death experiences and dangers, of which I in particular, as the youngest, only developed a less than pale inkling. It was only as I grew older that I appreciated that a risky life marked by pain and abandonment is not at all pitiful in so far as these episodes are behind one. The saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is true here, although as with everything, it can have a downside. You certainly are not loving those episodes while they last, they hurt, they disturb. But once they are over they make up the best stories.
For me, remorse is not necessarily connected with mistakes I have made, i.e. experiences I have had, regardless of their nature, but rather with having abstained from lived reality, i.e. having given preference to certainty over spontaneity and chance.
It is precisely this that sometimes drives me to despair, a form of civilisational disease, if you will. Modern people have - only apparently - deprived themselves of the experience of a perilous life, in the sense that they tend to undertake risky manoeuvres intellectually or do not perceive those concerning their bodies as perilous in this respect. For example, driving a car or other speed-generating transport. It is always possible to have a fatal accident or kill others. However, people do not generally think this way when they get into a car and are about to drive off. I accept this and am therefore annoyed in a certain sense when an accident then occurs that the clamour for safety becomes great. Ships sink, planes crash, cars collide. But that doesn't mean that I wish people dead, it just means that I accept it when it happens. A big difference.
You can't say this so directly, people might interpret it as callousness and even naivety, because their argument for more safety is always: if it happened to you personally or your relative, you would also suffer and have asked for safety. That would even be true in a personal case and yet it doesn't apply to all those who die by accident every day because I don't have a personal relationship with all those people.
I mention this aspect because "all people" should never be my concern. If they were, then I would presume to be able to come up with the solution to all the problems in the world, as is happening right now. I think this is a distorted view of life and of things that are inexplicable and ultimately unsolvable.
Death is therefor something which can only be accepted as universal. Everything and every man dies, that is the biggest certainty for all of us. I irritates me, to say the least, when people talk about "overcoming deaths". I find it's the biggest nonsense.
That contradicts a bit what you said earlier. Not the whole sentence but that "never again". You said
Seems, that you still assume you won't make it much further but then, if I talk from distance and am not your wife, nor your neighbor, I applaud you in a certain sense for this "style" of life. I hope you understand me right. Though it does not harm to relativize and become a bit slower and cautious. Age provides us with more slowness, if we let it.
Perhaps the slowness age avails us isn't just decrepitude, but the momentary pause to reflect that enables us to consider before we act. Even if it's decrepitude, but avails us that moment to consider, I'll take it.
Excellent! This is a really successful expression that the weakness of age is also a strength. This gives ageing the dignity it deserves. A good conclusion to our conversation.