Mortality

In 2018 I had a car accident.

One of my best mates had just moved overseas, my brother had moved out for good, and I felt the tides of change sweeping me up.

I blasted myself on New Year’s Eve, and felt as though I awoke the first morning of the year with the ambition to grow into someone new.

At the end of the first week I got a haircut. It was the worst haircut I’d ever had, and nearly the last thing that I did in my life.

Evening at the Ringwood shops, I walked out of the hairdresser and asked the nearby bookshop if they had a copy of Christopher Hitchens' Mortality. It was published posthumously, a collection of his final writings, ruminations of a dying intellectual on life and, not so much how to die well, but how to live well enough that dying doesn't matter. The bookshop didn’t have a copy on hand, but I could order it in.

Life mimics art, we know this. When irony is at play, irony unintended, it is perhaps nature’s greatest attempt to match what humans try to create consciously.

About half an hour later after leaving the bookshop I was upside down, suspended by the seatbelt of my car. The smell of burning rubber, blood and gasoline.

I spent the night in hospital, the longest night I ever spent, flat on my back. We speak of miracles - whatever the cause, the doctors were astonished I had no injuries.

I walked out of that hospital the next morning, having not grown, but been jolted into someone new. And I have never looked back.