By Debbie Olujobi

Mortality is given, life is terminal by nature. I wouldn’t qualify as anyone’s comedian though my family would say I was raucous and fun loving.

I like to laugh, I love to eat, I like to play but for the most part, I am serious minded. I have had several letters from readers asking me to lighten up and I would have obliged if I knew how.

The honest truth is I do all things purposefully and consciously, that’s why I own my mistakes and embrace my achievements; not much to lighten up about that. I don’t consciously remember using the devil as an excuse for any of my misadventures, my motive for most things would be the pleasure they gave me or the sheer fun of it.

At this juncture in my life’s journey, I believe in God, I am a Bible believing Christian who believes  in heaven, my life is purposed towards the goal of making it there come what may. It means that I am now more than ever even more conscious and a tad more serious. It’s ironic that most people of faith want to go to heaven but are petrified of death, some more than others.

Friday last was a day like any other, got home from work rather tired and particularly hungry. I don’t eat much but I only eat what I enjoy and thankfully I am one of those who enjoy healthy fare. On this particular day vegetable and Eba (local mash made from cassava) was my belly’s delight and I had almost finished when heaven almost became a reality.

The African vegetable dish is a combination of all sorts of ingredients and a staple is dried or smoked fish, it gives the dish a certain smoky delicious taste. My delight turned to horror when out of the blue I felt a very painful needle size stab somewhere in my throat.

In a split second an invisible piece of bone had lodge itself into the jelly like annals of my oesophagus. I froze in panic and tried to cough it out but my gag reflex managed to place the bone out of finger, tongue and safety range.

It’s actually hard to describe the moments that followed and I remain humbled that a piece of bone that was barely an inch long was about to turn my lights out for good. How deep was that? How totally ineffectual to be taken out by a bone that was totally accidental to the enjoyment of the meal?

The world is a very dangerous place and I pray for safety in a bigger picture kind of way. I pray for peace, I especially pray for my country Nigeria, I pray for my family, my friends, I pray that I fulfil the purpose for which I was created and dialogue in a way that gives me peace with my maker.

I obviously don’t discountenance the possibility of little accidents in the home but that little bone in the throat accident was weird on many ominous levels. I never did find it but boy did it do damage. My throat swelled up so much, I could barely swallow saliva.

An hour later, my body felt like I had been stomped on by bulls in a stampede. Within hours I had chills, a headache, even more body pain. I needed painkillers and a sedative and my last thoughts before I fell into what was at best a fitful sleep was that the bone must have belonged to a vengeful fish or a dinosaur.

The real issue for me is not that I got a bone stuck in my throat, that’s no news; it wouldn’t be news if I was Barak Obama. The point is the total helplessness and loss of power one feels when little things suddenly become very big in a split second! I was actually floored by the little bone.

Navigating work and back home  in the times we live in is dangerous and coming back home safely is always a relief and we all should be thankful to do so. No one actually considers the possibility of a slaughter by fish bone (very funny now).

In the immediate aftermath of that little incident(little because I survived it) I began to question my own humility. One of the thoughts that crossed my mind was that I was going to be taken out by an inconsequential event and the more I thought about it the more I understood that nothing and no event is inconsequential.

The real issue is that we all ascribe some greatness to ourselves; that’s why we would qualify and grade accidents or even manners of death. Getting shot in a battlefront, dying atop an adulterous woman, slumping on the toilet doing the nasty or dying in a plane crash results in a translation of soul to spirit and if we are so blessed, earth to heaven.

So what really matters if everything and anything can change in a split second? Well the answer I proffer may be a bit confusing. “Everything and nothing really matters”. All events have consequences and whether we are directly involved and affected they matter.

They may affect different people in different degrees but they count in one way or the other; that’s a fact. What is more enlightening is how we choose to let those events affect  or bother us; so in that frame, nothing really matters. I have been trying to change my  normal ebullient nature to one of cool detachment.

I am very passionate and tend to invest too much effort and emotion in people, the result is that I get hurt when I feel unappreciated and bullied. Recently I had poured out my heart and soul into a project and I had felt very let down when those who had the most to benefit seemed to be rooting for the project to fail.

To God be all the glory, the project was a success but I took away the knowledge that nothing and really no one should matter enough that they affect our equilibrium. I want to say that I remembered my cool detachment in the epic confrontation between bone and throat but that’d be a bold faced lie.

After the pain, a few self pitying tears and days to heal, I was detached once again. It was just an event, nothing personal, it mattered on some levels and didn’t matter in that split second.