One of the unsolicited gifts we all receive on our 70th birthday is a starting position on the fairground-shooting-gallery of life.
Somewhere, where these existential decisions are made, we are placed in random position on a revolving belt and our little duck avatar sets off on a slow passage through the passing year while life takes random, pococurante pot-shots at us.
If we are lucky and make it to the other side,there is a brief, fleeting moment of celebration before grimly setting off again.
We barely notice that, each year, the revolving belt has slowed slightly and the pot-shots have increased.
With the passing of each year we come to realise the inevitability that our little duck is, indeed, sitting, and we are going to run out of luck eventually.
The celebrations of earlier birthdays are slowly replaced by a sense of relief and astonishment that we have made it through another passage across life's pot-shot gallery: another circuit around the sun.
But relief is accompanied by the realization that, every year, the odds are shortening. Reassurance that someone else is 99 and still runs a half-marathon every day is only reassuring to the statistically illiterate.
The fact is that, from the instant of conception, continuing survival is predominantly a matter of luck. Our genetic makeup is an obligatory component of our existence.
You don't get to choose whether you have blue eyes, a receding chin, a cleft palate, red hair or a life-threatening gene. It's a take-it-or-leave-it, all-or-nothing deal.
And chance is a lotto marble. Falling meteors and other Acts-of-God are unavoidable, and only serve to illustrate what a complete and utter bastard God is.
But somewhere, a seventeen-year-old kid is in the process of dealing with the combined distractions of a testosterone surge and resurgent acne, and has decided to take his mother's car for a drive and kill you (while you are elegantly demonstrating the futility of trying to emulate the fitness of the 99 year-old marathon runner by going for a ride on your bike), an event which involves a fair bit of Act-of-God and a modicum of pathetic effort to avoid the inevitable on your part.
So stop with the futile efforts to avoid the inevitable.
Just, simply, make the most of every day.
We are all going to die.
