Two questions from Twitter

 As usual I wasted too much time browsing Twitter today. In the process I ran across a couple of questions people posted, that caused me to think a little while.

What have you already spent over 10,000 hours at?

• The answer I posted was "Fatherhood."
• But also I spent that much time on my marriage, trying to understand Wife and learn how to live with her before finally throwing in the towel.
• And writing blog posts: not just here, but I mean short, informal essays generally. (In my case these are indistinguishable from long letters, and I include letter-writing in those hours.) I haven't spent the time learning how to create convincing fictional situations, or portraying characters evocatively, or anything that will ever help me write the Great American Novel. But the kind of thing I'm writing right now? Sure, no question.
• On the other hand I'm not sure I can say the same thing about any of the skills I use at work. Do you suppose that's a problem?

What has almost killed you?

I didn't post an answer to this one, and I feel funny answering it. In many ways my life has been absurdly privileged and safe. I grew up comfortably middle-class. I don't take part in extreme sports. I don't ski, or deep-sea dive, or race cars, or anything dangerous like that. Why could I even imagine that there have been things that might have almost killed me?

But then I realized that yes, actually I could think of things, even in my bland and cossetted life. Not many, but some.

• Middle-school bulllying. (Pretty sure they didn't intend to kill me. But there was one time where it's lucky I fell like this instead of like that, or I could have snapped something.) 
• Near misses in traffic. (Once on the freeway I drove beside a wreck as it was in the process of happening. I'm sure there have been other cases I just don't remember right now.)
• Once when I was four I almost ran off the edge of a high cliff, just for the hell of it. And then stopped, turned around, and decided to go the other way. 
• I have the vaguest memory of falling into a swimming pool years and years before I ever learned how to swim, and being fished out by some nearby adult.
• Falling on the ice and banging my head. OK, maybe the concussion didn't really come close to killing me. I don't really know. But if you wrap that together with the driving in white-out conditions I'd done a couple hours earlier, I can definitely say that that day was a scary  one.

And those are just the events that come burbling up in my memory without me trying too hard. Probably there have been other events too, that I'm just not thinking of.

How does anyone ever make it to -- let alone through -- adulthood?