What Are The Elements Of A Good Life?

A few years ago I had to attend a road traffic accident. It was a dark and dirty November night; two young women had been struck by a taxi and were lying unconscious in the road. Bystanders hung around, shocked, scared, uncertain what to do.

The dismal rain made this a scene of horror and chill. It was unnerving.

Kneeling on the road to help, I was soon drenched with cold rain and shivering until my teeth rattled. Warm sticky blood soaked into my clothes, as I worked on the most critical of the two victims, anxiously awaiting the ambulance. In the poor visibility, my own safety was not assured as unheeding traffic thundered past mere inches away.  I was constantly splashed with icy cold rainwater.

Somehow a brush with death, not necessarily one’s own, is a moment for considering the worth of what one is doing. Fate herself seemed to step out of the darkness and speak. It was a simple clear message which only a fool could fail to grasp:

How we waste our fragmentary and precious lives.

True, I have seen people die many times on the hospital wards. But in a sense that which we see on the wards is a different kind of death to the one which hovered close by in the dismal rain that night. Somehow this was more immediate; – challenging us, as it did right there on the street, mixed up with our ordinary everyday lives. The finger of doom pointed accusatively at two young women. But it pointed at me too…

For there is always that universal reproachful question importuning in all such moments: am I doing the best I can with every moment of this fragile life–truly?

Let us firm these suspicions of inadequacy into neatly phrased, if accusative, questions:

Have we done the best we can with others? (our family, friends, neighbors and strangers) Is there anything that should, at the last, be UN-done? Many of us would like to be remembered fondly for our best achievement; but what if we were remembered solely for our worst act in life—what impression would we leave behind on history?

Are we up to date with our duties? Or have we been shirking those things we KNOW we must do, putting them off for some other more comfortable time that would suit ourselves and not those around us?

Perhaps we can put it all into the one question, most awful of all:

If we knew our last moments were at hand, is there anything we would wish to change?

I know I thought about it again and again in the ensuing days. Continue reading →