My near-death experiences

When I was 4 years old, I tested the range of a TV remote control upstairs at my dad’s afterschool math academy. I walked backwards slowly, scientifically, switching the TV on and off, intently focused on the distance. I carefully turned out of the room, until my foot stepped on empty air. I tumbled down a flight of stairs but thankfully landed on my back. If I had rotated just a bit more, I could’ve crushed my neck and died. 

When I was 8 years old, my family and I visited the Grand Canyon in Arizona. While we expected to experience a Mojave Desert type deal (I watched too much Man vs. Wild as a kid), we were instead greeted with a view that was so beautiful, it looked fake. After about 15 minutes, I got bored of aweing at the textures and layers of chestnut/amber rock, I started messing around on the cliffs. There was fencing on the spots that provided the best scenic outlook, but I was playing on a less scenic cliff that wasn’t fenced with my sister. I’m not exactly sure how it happened but at some point, I ended up falling off one of the cliffs, but landed only 3-4 feet down on a little lip of the cliff. If I had fallen off the clip a couple of feet to the side, I would’ve tumbled down much more than a flight of stairs.

 When I was 11 years old, I was in the car on the way back from a road trip to Seattle on a snowy January weekend, when my dad lost control of a the car, flipped 180 horizontally, went down a hill to a side road off the interstate highway, flew off the road down another hill and this time airborne, landed on the side. No one was injured in this car accident. Since this was a 20-hour car ride, I had taken my seatbelt off for most of the trip, so I could sit in a comfortable position to watch movies on my laptop. For this specific occasion however, I luckily had my seatbelt on which probably kept me from getting very seriously injured. 

When I was 13, I rode a bike for the first time in a couple years. Since I didn’t have any gaming consoles growing up, I spent most of my time riding my bike. This inevitably led me to be an expert in riding my bike. Jumping up curbs, skid stops, wheelies, rock jumps were a piece of cake in my prime. Now, cocky little 13-year-old me on my bike, primarily fueled by the desire to show off to the visiting Korean students at my house, jumped a manhole cover at a quite not-so-safe-without-a-helmet speed. While I was going to finish my act with a dope rear-wheels-locked skid turn/stop, I accidentally pulled the left brake instead of the right. For those who don’t know, or are not biking-inclined, when you are in the “standing” position on your pedals and leaning forward, your center of gravity is very close to being above the front wheel. Furthermore, when you pull on the left brake lever, it engages the front brakes. If you don’t get the picture here, I essentially was thrown forward, past my handlebars as my bike was flipped from under me. The landing wasn’t pretty. Gladly I stopped my face from getting messed up at the expense of the palms of my hands. But the death-defying aspect of this experience was how as my legs got tangled up in the pedals, I twisted my bike mid-air so that the seat came crashing down right next to my head. My shoulder was messed up, but at least my skull didn’t get crushed. 

I always thought near-death experiences would be like the movies where it’s always a drawn out slow-mo sequence where the character realizes the fact that they might die. But for me, my head was either very blank having not processed what was happening or I was fixated on something stupid (for example, during the car crash, I had been watching Transformer’s 3 [horrible movie don’t watch it] and mid-air, all I could think about was how cool Optimus Prime was). Perhaps it’s because each of these events were so sudden or something, but yeah, sadly no Hollywood magic for me irl. 

But the lesson of the day is: don’t be stupid. Don’t put yourself in excessive danger by not putting in the minimal effort to keep yourself safe whether it be wearing a seat belt in a car, or helmet on a bike, or exercising caution in dangerous locations. Bad things can happen real quick, and you might not be as lucky as I am.