Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life - Neil Strauss (2009)

Part II. FIVE STEPS

Lesson 5

When I was twelve, I used to wonder if I would live to see the year 2000. It seemed so far away. I’d sit in class and count on my fingers, trying to calculate how old I would be. In my head, I’d beseech God, “Please don’t kill me before the year 2000. I want to see what it’s like.”

And he spared me.

When I was fifteen, I used to wonder when I’d lose my virginity. I used to lie in bed, thinking about what it would be like to finally feel the naked flesh of a girl. And I’d beseech God, “Please don’t kill me before I experience sex. I want to see what it’s like.”

And he spared me.

When I was nineteen, I used to wonder what Europe was like. I’d sit in the college library, daydreaming about the cathedral of Notre Dame, the canals of Venice, the Eurorail, and Swedish women. And I’d beseech God, “Please don’t kill me before I go to Europe. I want to see what it’s like.”

And he spared me.

Today, I wonder what it will be like to become a father. Every night, when the nagging drone of unfinished work dies in my temples, I hope and pray that I don’t die in some sort of accident before I get to bring life into this world and watch that small, helpless being grow into adulthood.

Yet on every highway, there’s a drunk driver hurtling at 80 miles an hour in two tons of steel. In every neighborhood, there’s a thief armed with a deadly weapon. In every city, there’s a terrorist with a bloody agenda. In every nuclear country, there’s a government employee sitting in front of a button. In every cell in our body, there’s the potential to mutate into cancer. They are all trying to kill us. And they don’t even know us. They don’t care that if they succeed, we will never know what tomorrow holds for us.

The tragedy of life—robbing it of its fullness and brilliance—is the knowledge that we might die at any moment. And though we schedule our lives so precisely, with calendars and day planners and mobile phones and personal information management software, that moment is completely beyond our control.

Death is a guillotine blade hanging over our heads, reminding us every second of every day that this life we treasure so much is no more important to the universe than those of the two hundred thousand insects each of us kills with the front of our car every year.

Nature knows no tragedies or catastrophes. It knows no good or evil. It knows only creation and destruction. And one can never truly be happy and free, in the way we were as children before learning of our mortality, without at some point confronting our destruction. And all we can ask for, all we can hope for, all we can beseech God for, is to win a few battles in a war we will ultimately lose.