Wait, am I a cat?

Three near death experiences and one questionable conclusion

Last month, after cycling home from celebrating a friend’s 40th birthday, I did an accidental Wile E. Coyote cos-play with a lamp post.

It turns out cycling while tipsy, in the dark, distracted listening to a podcast is the kind of combination that you can get away with when you’re 20, but when you’re on the fresh edge of 40 it carries some very real life-threatening risks. I pranged myself up against a lamp post and narrowly avoided a serious head injury just by pure good luck and a natural inclination to tilt my head at a jaunty angle. Dafty.

It wasn't until I was safely home, nursing both my shame and a very sore knee, that I had that unsettling experience, what I call the Post-Near-Death Clarity (PNDC) Window.

You might have experienced it yourself - where everything becomes crystal clear for about 24 hours after a glancing frisson with death, before you go back to your normal life, running out of milk or doomscrolling the news and social media like you’ve got all the time in the world.

Sadly, this was not my first genuine close call with serious injury, nor my first glimpse through that Window.

There was another time 5 years earlier in Montenegro when my wife and I experienced the unpleasant contrast between relaxing holiday vibes and sudden terror.

One minute we were gently gliding into a quiet night drive home after a long-day hike in the Durmitor National Park. The long stretch of modern motorway was pleasingly empty as the darkness of the Balkan countryside enveloped us.

But in the next moment, I learned for the first time that there is no animal worth risking your life for, as I swerved and skidded off the road at 60 miles an hour in order to avoid the dog that wandered onto the ink-black motorway. I’ll never forget the nonchalant look of the dog’s face in my headlights completely contradicting the very real risk of bone-crunching, organ squeezing injury.

The subsequent adrenaline and genuine WTFness delayed the opening of that PNDC Window for at least 24 hours, but kept it firmly open for a while. The uneasy breeze of my internal dialogue reflecting: “That could’ve been your story man: Car crash at night, missing dog found”. It also made me think twice about ever driving at night again.

But if the bike incident was amateur hour and Montenegro was semi-pro, then what happened in the LA hills was Olympic-level near-death experience.

Many years ago, a friend of mine was driving the California landscape with his buddy, weaving up the dusty dry roads with - I like to imagine - that Turrell-esque radiating Pacific sun drenching them in an orange glow. Corner after corner taken with ease, until one featured a dramatically speeding car on their side of the road, coming at them at a reckless pace.

You would think in that moment that instinct takes over and the only thing you can do is react and just try and survive. Not for the buddy in the passenger seat.

In those dangerous micro-moments before contact, somehow he had the dramatic foresight to shout out to my friend:

THIS IS IT!

This is it, indeed. I cannot imagine a more incredible set of last words, that only one person would’ve heard.

But was it? Thankfully, no.

With another swerve, my friend and his buddy skid away from the oncoming car, near the very real edge of the mountain side road and avoided disaster. Another swerve away from death.

They lived to tell the tale, and my god am I glad to say it ended safely.

It’s one of my favourite stories of near-death precisely because they scooted on by - with the PNDC Window wide open, letting in that California breeze - with those 3 penetrating words to live the rest of their lives with: this is it.

It's weird how these moments stack up. Like some budget version of Final Destination, with more mundane plot twists and fewer elaborate Heath Robinson-type death machines.

However, the PNDC Window always closes eventually, like some cosmic snooze button on mortality awareness. One day you're having profound realisations about the preciousness of existence, the next you're back to spending forty minutes deciding which TV show to watch.

But each time the Window opens, it shows you the same view: that being alive is actually incredible, that we're moment-to-moment potentially flirting with death and disaster (be it self-inflicted or through bad timing), and that maybe life could be better spent using those moments to orient towards, and commit to, what makes us feel electrically alive, rather than comfortably numb.

So maybe I am a cat with nine lives after all. Not the graceful kind, clearly, but the type that somehow lands on their feet despite their best efforts not to.

Perhaps like any other animal, we're going to naturally alternate between moments of startling alertness and comfortable oblivion. But maybe, given we’re humans, we’ve been afforded a greater faculty: to make the most of those moments and deepen our engagement in the living world.

I'm not sure how many lives I have left on the ledger, but each close call has taught me something: life is short, wear a helmet, and maybe don't overthink your last words - they’ll probably be pretty gnarly 🤙

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