The Challenge of Partial Control

When I was 16, I accepted I would die.

It wasn’t hard to do—I was about to die! What point would there be in not accepting it?

Spoiler: I didn’t die. But at that moment, I thought I was about to die. I was jumping off a cliff into some water, with friends, on a volunteer trip in Kenya, and on this particular jump I did some sort of flip and thought I hadn’t cleared the part of the cliff below my jump spot that stuck out, and I saw the rock coming towards me and thought

“This is it. I’m going to smash my face into this rock, and then die of that impact, blood loss, or drowning.”

We were hours’ bumpy drive from anything remotely resembling a hospital.

Moments later, a splash—

—oh.

I spent a few minutes, shaken, sitting on the bank and appreciating my life.

Years later, I noticed that that acceptance of death wasn’t persistent. It was a kind of short-issue visa, and because it was issued last-minute it also expired pretty quickly.

And over the last few years I’ve noticed I have many layers of complexities in my relationship to death.

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