Pascal’s Gambit

I recently had a long driving trip, that was made enjoyable listening to an audiobook - Allen Eskens’ The Life We Bury,  where college student Joe Talber has a writing assignment to interview a stranger and write a brief biography.  Joe meets Carl Iverson, a dying Vietnam veteran, convicted of murder.   I found the book to be very enjoyable but the following exchange between Carl and Joe was especially meaningful to me:

After all that time I spent wanting to die, trying to die, it took prison to make me want to live…   I started reading and thinking and trying to understand myself and my life. And one day I was lying on my bunk contemplating Pascal’s Gambit...  This philosopher named Blaise Pascal said that if you have a choice of believing in God or not believing in God it is a better gamble to believe, because if you believe and you’re wrong nothing happens.  You just die into the nothingness of the Universe.  But if you don’t believe in God and you are wrong, you go to Hell for eternity…  

I was surrounded by hundreds of men waiting for the end of their lives, waiting for that something better that comes after death.   I felt the same way.  I wanted to believe there was something better on the other side.  I was killing time in prison waiting for that cross-over and that’s when Pascal’s Gambit popped in my head but with a small twist.  What if I was wrong.  What if there was no other side.  What if in all the eons of eternity this was the one and only time I would be alive?  How would I live my life if that was the case?  What if this is all there is?...    It also means that this is our heaven.  We are surrounded every day by the wonders of life.  Wonders beyond comprehension that we simply take for granted.  I decided that day that I would live my life not simply exist.  If I die and discover heaven on the other side, well, it would be just fine and dandy.  But if I didn’t live my life as if I was already in heaven and I died and found only nothingness, well, I would have wasted my life.  Would have wasted my one chance in all of history to be alive…

I am sorry – I tend to get philosophical when thinking about the past… 

What hits you in this exchange?

For me – two points are indelibly captured in my memory.

First: Pascal’s Gambit!  This is the same logic I used back in college when I considered “the meaning of life” and a potential afterlife.  Like Bill W in Alcoholics Anonymous, rather that believing “this Universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere,” I believe “a mighty purpose and rhythm underlay all.” 

Secondly, the line:   I decided that day that I would live my life not simply exist.  Hmmm.  That is the crux of I DARE TO ACT – to choose to be me, to follow the promptings of the spirit.  To LIVE rather than simply EXIST.