RULE TO BREAK

“Eat, drink and be merry …”

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying yourself, and I’m certainly not one to advocate abstention when it comes to food and drink. But the Rule above ends ‘… for tomorrow we die’. While there’s no denying that we’ll all end up dead eventually, there’s no need to hurry it along. So by all means be merry, but don’t be as foolhardy as the Rule implies.

It’s hard to believe that you’re mortal when you’re young. As life goes on, people start to fall by the wayside and sooner or later – if you’re not one of them – you realize how fine a thread you hang by until the Fates decide to cut it. Life is more fragile than it seems, and death is devastating to those who are close. Until you have experienced this at first hand it’s hard to encompass, but some grief lasts forever and ruins lives. And all too often it’s caused by the briefest and most unthinking of actions.

I knew a lad who climbed into a car with a friend who had drunk too much. He was a great guy – never drank when he was driving, but for some crazy reason he let someone else do it and then drive him home. Except he never got there. I expect he’d done it loads of times before and always got away with it. And that’s the big mistake. You think because it’s always been OK before, it will be OK this time. But actually the more times it’s been OK before, the more chances are silently running out for you.

The lad’s mum had an RIP tattoo done on the back of her neck after he died, dedicated to him. A couple of months later, she was talking to another young man about not driving too fast. He said he knew he should slow down, but somehow he didn’t. So she showed him her tattoo and said, ‘When you get home, have a look at your own mum, and think about where you think she should have her tattoo done when you die’.

We owe it to our mums, dads, brothers, sisters, children, friends and everyone around us to do our best to stay alive. Our lives aren’t only our own, we share them with the people we love, and we have a responsibility to them to be sensible about driving, drinking, drugs, safe sex, dangerous sports, crime and anything else that could threaten us. I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn to skydive if you want to, but take safety seriously. It doesn’t make you a scaredy-cat, it just means you’re responsible and you care about the people close to you. If you die because you can’t be bothered to look after your own safety, how angry do you think that will make the people who love you most? And with good reason. Looking after yourself is one of the best ways you can look after them.