Imagine my relief when I made it out of bed alive last Monday morning. It was touch and go there for a while, but I managed to scrape through.
Getting up was not the only death-defying act I performed that day. There was shaving, for example; that was no walk in the park. Then there was showering, followed by leaving the house and walking to work and spending eight hours at the office. By the time I finished my day--a day that also included eating lunch, exercising, going out to dinner, and going home--I counted myself lucky to have survived in one piece.
Until recently I’d had no idea that an ordinary Monday could be such an extraordinary minefield--but a minefield it is. According to mortality studies conducted by dozens of organizations, from the National Safety Council to the American Medical Association, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Departments of Transportation and Commerce, there is not a single thing you can do in an ordinary day-- sleeping included--that isn’t risky enough to be the last thing you ever do. In 1994 professor of philosophy Larry Laudan of the University of Hawaii collected all these dire findings and published them in a sort of handbook of everyday hazards that he dubbed, appropriately enough, The Book of Risks. Against my better judgment, I recently decided to consult Laudan’s collection to determine just how serious the dangers are that everyman faces every day. The everyman I picked was me, the day I picked was a Monday, and the news, I learned, was grim indeed.
