DEFINING MOMENTS

Early Sunday morning, around 7 am, I witnessed a motor accident where a Matatu (Omnibus public transport) crashed into a boda-boda (motorbike public transport) carrying a woman – this boda-boda guy rode right into the main road without looking and the Matatu swept into its side. The woman was sent flying but the driver and his boda-boda were trapped under the front of the Matatu and dragged along for about 15 feet. We were in another Matatu on the road in the opposite direction and had just stopped to let off some passengers when we heard the crash and grinding noise as the boda-boda was dragged along… We saw the woman lying in the road with one of her legs sticking up at unnatural angle, and after a minute or so she begun to call weakly and tried to get up off the road. She was bleeding profusely from her mouth and somewhere around her middle. Some men came to remove the man from under the Matatu and although he didn’t appear to have a scratch on him, he was all limp – some people in our Matatu said he was dead for sure…

That very day my volleyball team-mates and I were heading out to a town two hours away for a tournament, and since a couple of us were going to be using public transport, we were really shaken by that scene. Some of our other team mates were coming up behind us and they said they found the woman being carried onto the back of a pick-up truck, and that her leg basically snapped off below the knee as she was being lifted, causing them to cry out and avert their faces. About 50 metres beyond this point we found another Matatu that had crashed into a palm tree by the side of the road and the passenger side was badly crashed – we imagined whoever had been sitting there certainly had broken legs if he was lucky enough to be alive at all!

The first thing I did was to text my sister and ask her to pray for our safe journey – me - the one who has turned my back on the Christian God. What did this say about what I believe or fear deep down? AT the same time, and this has occurred to me quite frequently in the past few months, I considered JUST how close death is to us, or at the very least, mutilation, pain and suffering; and how one's life as they know it can change in a moment! We go around with this complete obliviousness of how close death is… Maybe it is nature’s way of preventing us from becoming immobilised by the knowledge – maybe it would be difficult to reproduce or eat or go about any kind of business. The Buddhists, though, teach their followers to be highly aware of life and death, and from a young age children are exposed to it. They embrace death and live with it everyday, which is why they choose to live simply and only do things that have deep and lasting impact, such as loving others, sharing their worldly goods, living peacefully and trying to attain enlightenment – which I understand to mean realising the ‘truth’? Or meeting one’s ‘true self’ or ‘true nature’ – not sure, haven’t studied it in that much depth.

I also thought about how my Mom is always worrying every time I have to go on a journey anywhere – saying I should be careful and pray and all that. I gained a new appreciation of that because as a passenger (or even as a driver), sometimes one has so little control over what other road users are going to do – so one really should pray. On the other hand I also considered the idea of fate, and if one can really avert what is meant to be – obviously one should take all precautions possible, but ultimately, we have little control over whether we live or die, or when we die. All we can do is try to lead a meaningful life (whatever that consists of), and to savour life in all its richness. Finally, at such moments one wonders if this life is so fleeting, is that all there is? What lies beyond life?

All in all, quite a defining moment for me!