Re-Coyle: Staying Alive

How much do you value your own life? To what lengths or extremes would you go to stay alive? All of us have been in circumstances where we believed our demise was imminent. What action, or better yet, non-action did you take?

Almost everyone has stepped off a curb; their mind pre-occupied with other important matters like what they are having for lunch, and heard the squealing of tires before facing the front end of a car. I bet the only reaction by the majority of people was to freeze-in-place, almost creating the certainty of death if the vehicle fails to stop.

But what about a situation where you have time to mull over and think about a response to your predicament? Say you are trapped on the second floor of a burning house. Would you open a window and jump out? Or is your fear of heights going to allow your body to be fried to a crisp?

If you deliberate very long, it’s probably too late to make a decision to save your skin. Now jumping out of a two-story window may be a quick thought for many, but what if you are on the fourth floor? Do you give up and just keep screaming or try to figure out a way to scale down the gutter or hope to grab a window ledge on a lower floor? The prospect of grabbing something to break your fall plays fairly well in the movies, but it is still a better option than having your socks on fire with no chance of escape.

Every decision to save your life from any calamity is based on balancing our multiple fears against the odds of survival. For example, riding a gutter to the ground or leaping into a nearby tree, which may save your life if you are successful, versus remaining in a burning building where the heated fumes will probably kill you within seconds.

Is deciding your method of surviving (or dieing, if you are unlucky) more terrifying then facing death? Perhaps this is the predicament your protagonist will face in your next horror novel.

On second thought, I don’t even want to get started thinking about making a decision regarding our fears. I’m afraid that would take way too long.

Brian Douglas Coyle, a graduate of Kent State University in Ohio, has over 30 years of experience in the banking industry. He is currently the Community Development Investment Manager at BB&T, the eleventh largest bank in the country. Brian is the author of Soul Riders and the 2008 release The Devil’s Sanctuary.