Sometimes I get in this weird mindset: I see people including myself in terms of how much – or better said less – time somebody is potentially away from death. So sitting on the couch as a potato, fit and well, the closest you come to death in the sense of elapsed time is maybe 30 minutes if your hart decides to quit its job. As I said pretty weird.
But as I told the below story I learned some others have these thoughts as well sometimes. A neighbor told me he often thinks – when driving on a national two lane road – when somebody passes him on the other side of the road they are only milliseconds away from death if one of them hits the curb of the roadside or decides to leave the earth but wants to take an other being along for the trip.
Just a few days ago I was driving on a road near my house. Nice wide and straight road, two lanes. No traffic apart from me in my car and a cyclist driving the same direction. As I like giving cyclists some extra room and no traffic on the other lane I moved up a bit and moved well over the middle line of the road. And luckily I did.
The moment I passed the guy, the very moment I noticed he wore huge headphones, he made an almost 90 degree unannounced left turn. It was so sudden that I did not have any time to react. I was sure I was going to hit him, but I missed his front wheel with only centimeters to spare. Would he have turned a split of a second earlier, or would I have driven were cars normally drive I would have hit him directly “mid ship”.
With my heart pounding in my throat I looked in the back mirror at the guy peddling onwards to the other side of the road thinking: “Do you realize you were only 0,5 second away from death?”
Luckily both our lives could move on “untouched” after this near miss, how different could both our futures have looked… 0,5 second can make a huge difference.