D. H. Lawrence wrote that “every year you pass an anniversary unaware: the
anniversary of your own death.”  From Deep Survival;Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why,  by Laurence Gonzalez.

    Sure, we do it in our ordinary lives, too- you can get killed on your  lunch break- but we do that blindly.  In our adventures, we engage fate  deliberately.  We choose a relentless and indefatigable opponent, while others pretend to be safe.  We feel that our experiences are much more  real, while seeing the masses as deluded in their complacency. 

When  well-trained people are fetched off by fate during a well-planned and  thoughtful expedition, there is no more ignominy in it than when an  ordinary Joe gets hit by a bus.  No one says "He shouldn't have been  walking there."  But a climber named Karl Iwen, unfamiliar with Three Fingered Jack, a volcanic mountain in Oregon, which he was descending,  left his companions, left the trail, left his ice ax strapped to his pack,  and ventured out onto the snow, where he treated his companions to a  spectacular show as he slid into the couloir and did a 600-foot Peter Pan.  Karl did not die doing what he loved.  He died of poor impulse control, or  what I call "the rapture of the shallow."

     The perfect adventure shouldn't be that much more hazardous in a real  sense than ordinary life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break.  We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer.  Better to take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information, and  then go forward in the knowledge that we've done everything we can.

    No, some people would rather not see it, but the bull is there for all of  us.  Some of us choose to pass the cape in front of its horns.  To live  life is to risk it.  And when you feel the rush of air and catch the stink of hot breath in your face, you enter the secret order of those who have
 seen their own death close up.  It makes us live that much more intensely.  So intense is it for some that it seals their fate; once they've tasted  it, they just can't stop. And in their cases, perhaps we have to accept  that the light that burns brightest burns half as long.

     I do adhere to what my daughter Amelia calls the Gutter Theory of Life.  It goes like  this:  You don't want to be lying in the gutter, having been run down by a
 bus, the last bit of your life ebbing away, and be thinking, "I should  have taken that rafting trip..." or, "I should have learned to surf..."  or, "I should have flown upside down- with smoke!"

     Pete Conrad was the third man to walk on the moon.  He died in a  motorcycle accident on an ordinary day.  It took him a while to die as he  went to the hospital.  I wonder what he was thinking.  I hope it was:  I
 did it all.  I took a risk.

 Laurence Gonzalez, from Deep Survival