I almost died tonight.
It justs stops you. While I was walking with my girlfriend in a street in my hometown of Turku, returning from a small, independent movie theatre playing "Adaptation", I heard a loud crashing-and-clinging about a meter behind me.
I turned around, scared stiff. An empty beer bottle had fallen from the nth floor of a building and it had barely missed me. At that very moment, I realized what had happened. All the other people in the street were watching, propably thinking how close the bottle was. To calm down my girlfriend, I lied. "The bottle dropped from that gentleman who passed us just a moment ago." But it really didn't.
While the idea - being killed by a falling beer bottle - is somewhat absurd, it made me think about life itself. I have no known enemies, so the deed - probably a mischief of a random drunkard - was not planned. Someone just wanted to hit somebody with a bottle - and he barely missed. Will the same person try again?
Just to think how close we are to death - every single day. Everything we are, everything we have done - it all can be wiped out in a blink of an eye. As an atheist, I don't believe that any God saved me - no, I just got lucky. The drunkard aimed poorly or perhaps I walked too fast.
But what would the world be like, if he'd got me? That makes me think. What would have happened? Who would have worried? There are plenty of possible futures - and none of them would have been nice.
What do I think now? Well, I propably don't sleep that well tonight. But I am happy to be alive - there's too much to see, too much to do. And yet... so fragile we are!