Death is the Incentive

Witnessing a persons life end is a strange and troubling experience.   Not only does it shock you in to the realisation that life is transient it also makes you realise that our own importance is negligible.  

This particular realisation struck me nearly twenty years ago when I was involved in a car accident on the M62 motorway between Manchester and Leeds.  It was an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon and I was travelling home from an appointment in Liverpool to my office in South Yorkshire.  I overtook a small lorry and in my rear view mirror I saw a small car coming up behind me at speed.  I pulled into the middle lane and looked to my right as a black Daihatsu Domino began to pass me.  A young woman was driving, at a guess I would say she was in her early twenties at most.  Suddenly the car in front of me, I think it was a Peugeot estate, pulled into the outside lane without any indication.

I remember the sudden look of fear on the young woman's face.  I remember the horrendous noise of squealing tyres.  I remember the car behind her - blue - but I don't remember anything else about it, other than it hit the back of the Daihatsu as it drew level with me.  I remember the sound, the horrible thud of metal on metal and seeing the larger car hit and crush the little Domino.

Then I felt an impact in the back of my own car and I careered across the road and I lost sight of the Daihatsu.

Whoever she was she died on that Friday afternoon, just another casualty of an RTA on the British motorway network.  I still wake up in the early hours seeing the look of fear on her face, literally a second before she died.  In some ways it is the experience that shaped my life up to the present moment.  It was the split second that made me realise life is for the taking and in so many ways I acted upon it.  I began to take risks, especially in my work life.  I started working for myself, a decision that has changed mine and my families entire fortunes, even though at the time (and even later) it meant risking eveything we had.

More importantly it gave me the courage and the determination to leave the religion I had been born into thirty years earlier.  It took time - more than fifteen years after I witnessed the death of that young woman, but when I finally realised that the Governing Body and Jehovahs Witnesses were not the 'Truth' it was, to a large extent, the realisation that life is so short and precarious that helped me accept that the loss of friends and family is preferable to living a lie.

No matter how indespensible we think we are, life will go on regardless when we are dead. It's a harsh thought but true. 

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. Marcus Aurelius

How many Witnesses never live?  How many never face their doubts, never have the courage to look beyond the 'knowledge' provided to them by the Governing Body?

No matter how tough life gets, no matter how much life you think you have wasted in that Organisation, always remember that you now have the chance to live.  You are free from the chains of oppression and control.  You are now in a position to grasp life and make the very most of it, no matter your age, education or finances.

Tomorrow you might die.  It is irrelevant as long as today you really live.