Reckless Abandon

Sometimes, when I see the stupid things we do, I wonder how we even get to live this long in the first place, but now I'm just convinced it has nothing to do with us and our lifestyle, but rather there's a divine being somewhere watching over us and preserving us from dying.

_{photo by Kristaps Solims}

Sometime last year, I remember experiencing a near-death experience that happened to someone while I was on my way to my aunt's house. The guy had decided it was a wise idea to cross a highway when there was clearly a flyover bridge not too far away from where we both stood. Luckily for him, he escaped it, but something tells me that wouldn't be the last time he would be doing something that stupid because it's clearly in his DNA.

But you see, what he did is small compared to the next story I'm about to tell you guys, one that I saw yesterday. And I say it's small because if something had happened to that guy, if he had gotten hit by a car, he probably would have lost just his life, which would clearly be as a result of his own foolishness, but what I saw yesterday has the capability of claiming a lot of lives all at once.

Yesterday, I had to go to a different filling station than I usually go to because the filling station close to my place didn't have petrol. This was the first time I was going there for a very long time, and maybe that was why it didn't take long for me to notice the new little shop (it wasn't even a shop, just a table and some products on top of it) that has been mounted right next to the filling station.

At this tiny little store, the lady there was frying akara (aka bean cake). Now, for those of you who don't know what that is, akara is a type of food that is made from ground beans and then fried in hot, deep oil, so right next to her table was a makeshift stove that uses firewood to fry the akara. This lady had a huge fire during rest next to a place where they sell petrol.

And what's even crazier and made me convinced that sometimes we just like to test God and see if he's really present was that when I got to this filling station, they had a huge truck of fuel and were just refilling the fuels in the filling station with the thousands of liters of fuel in the truck, and yet this woman had the nerve to light up her fire and continue to dry her akara.

Now in a situation like that, all it takes is for one thing to go wrong, and everything and everywhere will go kaboom. But just because it hasn't happened yet, no one seems to care, not even the police officers who drive past that road every day with their Hilux van, looking for innocent kids to arrest.