Making Peace With Life

We are hurtling down a Spanish motorway in the depth of winter, in the middle of the night, the road coated with black ice, the taxi driver out of control, driving at a wildly illegal speed. Everyone in the car is in a state of hysteria. We're all going to die. A passenger tugs at the driver. It's not worth it. He is chasing after a train we missed over 2hrs ago.

I am about to die. I am about to die. I look out of the window at the dark glistening night. Wild stars rage in the heavens. Fields glitter with ice below the fierce moon. A deep dark blue radiates from every corner. Thank you life. Thank you for all the moments of joy. Thank you for all the moments of beauty. Thank you even for all the difficult things. Thank you for this time of existing.

You find out a lot about yourself when you genuinely believe you're about to die. Myself? While everyone else was screaming, I just switched off and connected with the universe outside and gave it a torrent of last kisses as I awaited my grizzly imminent death.

Some years earlier, also in Spain, this time in the glorious warmth of summer, I came across a derelict dam. It was blocked off by large metal fences. But through them I could see an open manhole with a ladder going down into it. I dared my friend to break in with me and try climbing down it. At the time I was reading about lizard beings who lived inside the Earth, and I suggested we might meet them somewhere down there.

We scrabbled through a gap in the fence and started climbing down the ladder. We descended and descended. On and on. Slowly the bright day lit hole above us shrunk down into a tiny dot. My legs began to feel wary. So, wondering how far we had left to descend, I turned and looked down.

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Black. Never ending black. The ladder merely disappeared into nothingness. It's robust frame dwindling down to a tiny fragile thread, before vanishing into some subatomic scale.

Fuck! I grabbed the ladder, my legs turning to jelly. We need to stop! I explained that it was too far and we needed to climb back up. Later I would realise that the only people who ever use such ladders use harnesses which they clip on to cables. The climb back up was one of the most intense moments in my life. Legs almost giving way. Reaching for extra strength I didn't know I had.

All these thoughts of Spain remind me of another experience I had. This time as a child on a family holiday there. This time in the fierce heat of the south. We stayed at this villa on the edge of a half built complex of villas, with the wild rugged drylands spilling out from beyond our swimming pool. Bored, I once wandered off into it and found a mysterious mound. I grabbed a stick and started poking it. It must be some kind of ant hill. See how you like this ants! Laying into it, I stuck the stick down a particularly big hole. Suddenly a huge spider ran out at me. We're talking tarantula. Big fat hairy. I screamed in horror and ran crying back to the villa for my mother.

It is funny reflecting on these moments of horror or near death. I was at a party recently, and telling an atheist friend about some of my mystical experiences which lay at the heart of the book I'm writing. She asked me if they had helped me to make peace with death. I thought about that moment careening down that icy motorway in Spain. But upon reflection I told her that they had helped me make peace with life. After all, death, when it comes, will be something which I will have to make peace with while I'm finally staring it in its mysterious dark face. I have a sense that I'll be ok with it. But I also know enough about it to know that I can't really tell how I'll react when it finally comes for me.

But life is like a series of mini deaths. Second after second, leaving the world we knew before, for the unknown world ahead. Friendships which pass. The delicious joy of being in a place which you somehow never get back when you return there. Warm lips and soft skin, shared breaths and deep passionate union with someone you never see anymore. Raucous laughter at jokes you don't find funny anymore with a group of drunken people you don't know anymore.

No. What the depth of my most religious and spiritual experiences has taught me, is not how to make peace with death. It's how to make peace with life.

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Here is a fierce little drawing I did a few years ago. Perhaps there is something of that intense Spanish night in it.