Our will to live can move mountains and, at the same time, shatter our hearts to pieces.
Tragic drowning survivor Lashaun Armstrong discovered the power of one and the depths of the other last week — all at the tender age of 10.
If only he could feel the warmth of our embrace, gain strength from our tears and know that we are thinking of him.
It’s unbearable to imagine the little boy’s horror when he realized that his mommy — the woman who brought him and his three younger siblings into the world, and who by all accounts had been their rock — was now trying to drown them, and herself, by driving their van into the Hudson River.
The poor woman’s demons were so excruciating that they surfaced from the abyss of her inner turmoil to remove all grip of sanity from her anguished mind, compelling her to seek death for her own helpless and innocent flesh and blood.
Bur her eldest child was having none of it.
Lashaun miraculously managed to roll down a window and escape the submerging vehicle.
He put his panic on the back burner, and did what extraordinary people before him have done since the beginning of time when confronted by peril and their own mortality — he fought for his right to live.
There is much disenchanted masses everywhere that can learn from this courageous youngster, whose Herculean feat has catapulted him to the top of our exulted ranks for dissing death in his darkest moment.
Lashaun demonstrated that the primal instinct of man, woman, and child to wake up to another day has been the vital life force throughout our tempestuous history — and our only saving grace.
Our will to live transcends oceans, nations, cultures, politics and extreme danger. Without it, all that we hold dear would cease to matter or even exist.
Whatever the future holds for plucky Lashaun Armstrong, it could never be as bad as the alternative he just narrowly escaped. He was clearly aided and abetted by the only constant known to mankind — the will to live.
He will always be a winner for that. No matter what.