My friend, Todd, and I were engaged in some work the other day.  Well, we thought of it as work…someone paid us to do it and we would much rather have been somewhere else, so regardless of the effort exerted, it can be considered work.  Some of the labor we engaged in involved dangerous work with heavy machinery at great heights.

Actually, I guess it wasn’t really machinery, but it did have moving parts (hinges) and it was heavy, from a relative point of view, when lifted by one person.  Also, the height we were working at was only 7 or 8 feet, but I once read an article containing statistics that proved a good probability of breaking your ankle by falling off of a pair of platform shoes (obviously, this study was done in the ‘70s, the decade which saw the creation of the science of “fashion forensics”).  Now, the extent of the danger of working at this height can be computed by determining the ratio of a fall off of the 4 inch shoe soles to a height of 8 feet.  If you are conservative and assume that a fall of four inches will break only one of the bones in the ankle, you can divide the 96 inches in 8 feet by that distance, you can see that a plummet from this pinnacle could break 24 bones.  This amount of injury could be fatal, and that’s not even considering the geometric cumulative effects of the force of gravity which increases at a rate of 32 feet per second, per second until the object stops or reaches “terminal velocity”.[1]  If you calculate those figures, you’ll see that a fall from 8 feet will cause you to reach the ground moving at somewhere under, er, 1800 miles an hour.

Anyway, as we were working, Todd slipped and momentarily teetered on the edge of destruction, a fated moment between life and death – or at least life and a 500 dollar medical deductible.  Fighting to regain his balance, he hung there for, oh, maybe 6 or 7 microseconds…long enough for me to think, “*!?”

Using razor sharp instincts, cool thinking and years of experience as a person who usually remains upright while walking, Todd shifted his gaze from left to right, capturing his footing by counterbalancing with the mere weight of his eyeballs.  A veritable disaster, as well as the remainder of the day off, was averted.

Because of my intense curiosity, my desire to relate these facts to you, the reader, and the fact that we were getting paid by the hour, I questioned him relentlessly about his thoughts and feelings in that instant.  Amazingly, Todd was relatively unaffected by his brush with death.

“Did your life pass before your eyes?”, I asked.  “Did any regrets creep into the corners of your mind?”

No, Todd told me, he didn’t really feel he was going to die so his life didn’t pass before his eyes.  He did feel he might be injured so he saw the last, oh, month and a half, but not his whole life.  The only regret he felt was a momentary reminder that he had allowed his medical insurance to lapse.

So much for my investigation into the near death experience.  I suppose I could ask around, but I don’t really know anyone who lives a life wrought with dangerous experiences.  Most of the people I know feel they run an extreme risk by stopping for a beer after work without calling home and telling their spouse.  In extreme cases this may be a hazardous endeavor, but for the most part it’s merely an act of consideration…meaning the person will consider how much grief she will receive from her spouse and his nagging about it and decide it’s worth the quarter it costs to call home.

I would think that everyone will, at one time or another, have an experience they personally feel is dangerous or life threatening.  These experiences are largely relative to each individual; that is, the danger they are exposed to is high in comparison to other things they have done, but not necessarily high compared to the activities of others.

For example, a person is surely partaking in a dangerous activity by smoking two packs of filterless Camels in, say, forty-eight minutes.  While you may see thing as a bit fuzzy for a time, the immediacy of the danger is somewhat less than that of a person who feels the obsession to inspect the hood ornament of high speed White Freightliners.  When a person is lying in a hospital in “serious”, “critical” or “severely damaged:  awaiting replacement parts on back order” condition, the argument as to the relative danger of the activity involved is largely done away with.  I suppose I could hang around the critical care unit and ask these people how they felt, but there’s a certain morbidity to that, not to mention severe boredom and possibly actual work.  Besides, I don’t like hospitals.

Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to draw on my own dangerous experiences, the worst of which could be relegated to near hangnail status.  When I was younger I did experience some moments which were high in danger, but during the activity I didn’t think much about it since I was really busy being involved in a dangerous situation.  My guess is, if you choose a time like this to start thinking about death, these situations become more dangerous because you’re obviously not paying attention to what you’re doing.

As I matured and became more responsible (read:  grew older) these types of things happened with much less frequency and severity.  Nowadays a severe occurrence has pretty much been downgraded to a near-injury experience.  This is largely due to the advent of safety features such a seat belts, personal floatation devices, bright, reflective clothing and Kevlar body armor.  The use of equipment of this nature greatly reduces the odds that a person will come to an untimely end while watching television at home.

[1] This is the maximum velocity an object can reach powered only by the force of gravity, although if you were approaching the ground at this speed the words “terminal velocity” would take on a whole new definition.