I once wrote a blog here talking about a near death experience which happened to a friend, but just because nothing fatal happened, we all overlooked it like it was nothing when that entire situation had potential to have ended his life if things had gone even slightly wrong.
The way everyone dismissed that entire situation has refused to leave my mind because all I've been doing ever since was ask myself "What if?"
Which led me down memory lane, to different times of my life where I could have possibly lost my life if things had gone slightly wrong, but we ended up not looking at it as something serious because we came out alive and in this case, unharmed.
It was around 2013 or thereabout if I'm not mistaken. A huge truck (we call them tankers) carrying kerosene had collapsed at the highway really close to our house back in the day and its content began spilling into the gutter.
That day, I remember seeing people running over to the highway, they had empty gallons with them and I was wondering what was happening, that was when I heard my mom call out to me. She was the one who told me about the tanker and had quickly asked me to go along with her as she grabbed an empty gallon in her shop.
Now this was around 2013 and at the time I didn't know any better, so when we got to the highway and my mom asked me to jump into the gutter to scoop out as much kerosene as I could, I did. But you see, we got there a little bit too late and the entire place was filled up with people trying to gather as much kerosene as they could, while the driver of the trunk just stood there and watched.
He knew there was nothing he could do to save the kerosene because the entire thing already spilled into the gutter, and all he could do was just stand and wait for help to arrive, so that he could lift his truck right and be on his way.
Back to us trying to gather the spilled kerosene, myself and my mom ended up going home with nothing and when my dad came back home later that evening and heard about what my mom did, they had quarreled that night because my dad had told her how dangerous what she made me do was, he had told her how easily I could have lost my life if that whole place had caught on fire.
Funny enough, at the time, I thought he was overreacting because nothing bad happened to me, but looking back at that entire situation now, I realized how dead I would have been if some dumb person there had maybe decided to lit a cigarette or something.
But as usual, I didn't think about all of this then because it didn't happen. But you see, maybe sometimes we do have to think about the worse possibility that could happen and probably see if we will survive it before we do certain things, because although no one wants something bad happening to them, we do have to ask ourselves the "what if" question.
If we think like this more often, we might end up not taking some of those stupid decisions that we do take on a daily.