Russian Writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky stared death in the face once.
See, he was arrested under political pretense and for months awaited his sentence in jail.
When Dostoyevsky’s sentence finally came, all the prisoners he was with were divided up into groups and marched in front of a firing squad.
Others were shot in front of him, but just as Dostoyevsky was set to be next, a messenger appeared with a pardon from the czar.
And Fyodor Dostoyevsky was shipped off to exile in Siberia.
He chose to look at his subsequent time on earth as nothing but a gift.
Maybe we should all do the same.
Because the fact that you even exist is insane, if you think about it.
Later that morning, Dostoyevsky was told his new sentence: four years hard labor in Siberia, to be followed by a stint in the army. Barely affected, he wrote that day to his brother, “When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness,… then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift… every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If youth only knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.”
-Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies Of War
