If you haven’t been worrying about the fate of Michael Schumacher, perhaps now is the time to start. Doctors have spent the past two weeks attempting to bring the seven-time Formula One World Champion out of the coma he’s been in since a December 29 skiing accident, but attempts to elicit responses to “deliberate stimuli” have been absent. Rather, Schumacher has only displayed reflex twitches. By Brandon Turkus at Auto Blog.

Michael Schumacher has been unconscious for almost a month and a half. I wonder how that can be? Two months ago, he was one of the fittest human beings on the planet. He has been in crashes at over 150 miles per hour and walked away…smiling. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head and was off the ventilator in three days. I keep thinking how capricious life is. All of it, at every level.

We live on a planet that is large enough to have an atmosphere and small enough to not have crushing gravity. We are the right distance from the sun to have water that isn’t frozen or boiling. However, what amazes me every day is the afternoon traffic. There are about seven million people in the Bay Area and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 16% or 331,000 people use mass transit. That means that about 1,738,000 don’t use mass transit. Some walk and some ride a bike, but most drive; there are, very roughly, somewhere around 1,000,000 cars on the road every afternoon.

Most days, there is an accident or two, sometimes three and occasionally none. We have all had an occasion in which we jammed on the breaks and just missed plowing into somebody or something. That happens a hundred times a day, every afternoon, and in almost every case, it is a near miss. I find that amazing: amazing that there are so few accidents and amazing that there is one almost every day.

I find it amazing that we live on such a thin edge. That we could trip and fall and end up like Michael Schumacher or, much, much, more likely, get up and walk away with a dirt stain on our pants, mumbling about how unlucky that was.