What would I do if…?

Let’s say somebody had a gun pressed against your temple and they were going to pull the trigger unless you, for example, prayed, or wrote a story, or stood on your head. Let’s assume that you didn’t want to die, weren’t anywhere near ready, had important things left undone.

Of course you can easily imagine such a scenario. I’m sure you play that game with yourself sometimes. It’s fun.  The “what would I do if” game, the “If I only had a week to live” game.  These games make sense because they are a cheaper alternative to years of psychotherapy or career counseling: Finding out what your life is worth to you and why.

The gun fantasy is a stretch for us lucky folk. Guns are for T.V. and movies, guns kill people in foreign countries and lousy neighborhoods. Guns and bullets and open wounds are as far away from our daily lives as having a dream come true, really and truly all the way true without residual guilt or Karmic payback.  Just a sheer, unmitigated miracle, a windfall, a lucky break so astounding, so improbable as to provoke an unfathomable envy and awe in others and a stunned disbelief on your part.

“What would I do if-?” So goes the head game.

This question addresses the concerns of free choice, destiny, genetic propensities, emotional maturity, lack of initiative, addiction to risk, denial and/or string theory, alternative universes, fifth dimensions, God, Goddess, or Gods, Goddesses, infinity, time and space, black magic, so it is no surprise that you cannot honestly answer the questions unless a gun is really and truly being pointed at the side of your head, and is loaded, and is being held by a person who could care less whether you lived or died. A person who would as soon pull the trigger as not?

Well, imagine that that person is you yourself and you are

aiming the gun at your own head and isn’t that what you’re doing when you don’t wear a seatbelt, or smoke, or meet strange men in dark alleys or eat unwashed vegetables?  Isn’t that what you’re doing when you beat up on yourself for making a mistake, in other words, being human, because you think you should be better than human, because you insist that you are more than human, because it makes you feel superior to know that you can change the facts, change the future, control your destiny, and be the exception to every rule or at least one or two rules, because you are right and FEEL right on some level, and better yet, believe that someone else is wrong and/or has wronged you and will pay the price.

Some people would rather be dead than wrong, and that is why the gun game is dangerous. Shooting ourselves in the foot is the least of it. It is rather a slow body, soul and mind death from a multitude of mini bullets, bee-bee gun punctures in a grand scheme.

“What would I do if there was a gun at my head?” – The chances of that happening are miniscule. The question is mute and can teach us nothing.