Roy Tennant shares about how he is fortunate to still be alive after surviving several accidents.
I’ve been lucky, but recently I’ve realized that we’re all lucky. All of us stand on a pinnacle built by survivors. When my father was a boy, while running to a cellar to escape a tornado, his foot was caught in the front door. He lay there and watched the tornado destroy the barn only yards away while the rest of the family were in the cellar wondering where he was.
I’ve been similarly lucky. Born on an Indiana farm, I likely dodged multiple painful deaths by the age of five. Then, I tried to climb into a cave in the Grand Canyon from the wrong direction that no one ever did because it was stupid and dangerous. I also somehow avoided a head-on car collision at freeway speeds as well as falling off a ladder onto concrete a few years ago.
Despite world wars, famines and pandemics, our ancestors somehow survived long enough to successfully procreate. That may not sound remarkable, but it is. Some 900,000 years ago, the precursors of homo sapiens were reduced to 1,280 breeding individuals. But humanity survived. Although that may have been our darkest days as a species, there were many dark days ahead.
Still, our ancestors dodged every one of these catastrophic disasters to persist and procreate. We are, in a fundamental and deeply meaningful sense, the lucky ones. Meanwhile, major disasters are only the “marquee” ways to die. We’re surrounded by a much larger and far more prosaic set of methods for kicking the bucket, and yet, I’m still lucky to be alive.