RE: Oder of Death

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.

Better that I figure out how I got harmed and set boundaries that will keep it from ever happening again.

That contradicts a bit what you said earlier. Not the whole sentence but that "never again". You said

One of these days I'll fall under a bus, eat a bullet, or something. Luck can't carry a guy forever.

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.