Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
The last couple of days have been ones of reflection and philosophical musings that have left me with questions that I'd previously thought I already knew the answers to.
As sober a topic as it might be, death has been on my mind. Not my own but the actual process that leads up to it. I was watching an episode of Miami Ink one night and a customer wanted a tattoo to remind him never to take life for granted after he'd gotten very drunk in a hotel one night and had been running down a corridor and misjudged the distance he had to the end.
As a result he went right through the floor-to-ceiling window at the end and plummeted 17-storeys to the ground and survived. A couple of days later I read about the teacher who was run over and killed as he rode his bike on the pavement last Friday morning and, like everyone else, thought of what a tragedy it was.
A tragedy yes, but sadly not that surprising in this part of the world where the driving is so bad that we can open the newspaper almost any day of the week and read about some poor soul or other that has been killed by a speeding motorist as they tried to cross the road.
What stood out about this particular incident was the fact that the teacher - Cameron John Clow from New Zealand - wasn't crossing the road - he wasn't even on the road at all - he was on the pavement where cars aren't supposed to be and it was on a Friday morning which is generally the quietest traffic time of the week in Bahrain.
Again, with the driving the way it is here, it's not all that unusual for a mad driver to mount the curb but if you take a moment to think about it, what are the chances that a driver travelling down a not too busy road would mount the curb at the precise moment and place that a cyclist is riding on it? The odds against such a thing have got to be very long indeed. And the odds against surviving a 17-storey fall have got to be just as long.
I've always been a strong believer that when it's your time, it's your time and these two separate events only reinforces that view for me. But that belief doesn't make the young teacher's death any less tragic and my heart goes out to the family, fiancŽe and friends of the victim and along with everyone else, I hope very strongly that the driver isn't allowed to get away with a fine and a few months in prison as is so often the case here. His carelessness has taken another person's life, irrevocably changing the lives of all who knew him and as such the driver should be punished severely.
And that's where my confusion started to set in. If I truly believe that we all have our set time to pass on and, like many in this part of the world, that it is God's will, I also have to believe that it was God's will that put the driver where he was in order for the victim to have been run over and killed. Why then do I feel so angry towards the careless driver? If what was meant to happen happened, why do I feel so strongly that someone should be punished for it?
I remember being very angry a couple of years ago, after a couple of very young children were killed crossing a motorway and the paper quoted the parents as saying that they forgave the driver because it was God's will. Any time a child dies it's hard to be objective and for the parents to have been as forgiving as they were was very difficult for me to understand (despite my time theory) but what really made me angry was the fact that the parents had allowed those children (if memory serves they were no older than six or seven) to be anywhere near a motorway unsupervised in the first place.
While the driver who killed them has to take a certain amount of responsibility, as a driver I can imagine that if these children came out of nowhere, avoiding them would have been near to impossible on a busy motorway and the real responsibility lies in the hands of those who allowed such young children out of their sight in such a dangerous area. But surely believing as I do, I should have just thought that, as tragic as the incident was, those children were going to die one way or the other anyway so why was I so angry with the parents?
Death is the one certainty in life. It doesn't matter who we are, the one thing we can be sure of is that one day we will die. With enough planning, we can cheat just about anything in life except death and the logical reason behind that is that death is God's will.
Thoughts lead on to other thoughts and many more questions I don't have space to share with you have come up in the last few days but it seems to me life was so much simpler when we were younger.
Growing up we're told that we still have so much to learn and we'll understand more when we're grown up but I can't help feeling life was much more cut and dried when we were younger and convinced we already knew everything there was to know.
Maybe ignorance truly is bliss.
