This morning I watched "Senna," the recently released documentary on Ayrton Senna. WOW... it is so worth watching. Not only is it a trip down memory lane, with so much of it set in the late 80's and early 90's, but it is also such a great insight into what he was like as a person. It's so easy to see celebrities as 'the racing car driver' or 'the cricketer' or whatever. But to really get to see another side of them and see what their thoughts are on life is amazing.
What people might not expect is how spiritual Ayrton was. Throughout many of his interviews he referenced his faith and belief in God and he described certain moments driving his car where he experienced being out of his body and beyond consciousness. He also talked a lot about how much he had to learn about life and being a man, beyond driving and racing, which was just as important to him.
The more I got drawn into his journey through Formula One and re-lived it the more I didn't want the race at the Imola track to come. It's crazy but I still found myself saying in my head 'don't race, don't race', even though I know full well you can't re-write history. It is very eerie to watch the lead up to the day of his death and to see how the events unfolded. How tense, sad and stressed he had been driving the Williams Renault car. How many problems the car had. The fact that another driver died just beforehand. How torn he was about whether to race the car.
On the morning that he died, he told his sister he had asked God to speak to him and he had opened his Bible. The page he opened to told him that God would give him the greatest gift of all - God himself. Undoubtedly something went wrong with the car because the turn Ayrton crashed on was not one that was difficult or that any of the drivers would have trouble with. He did not have one broken bone or bruise on him and was killed because the angle that he crashed on was such that the suspension shaft hit him directly in the head. Had the angle shifted slightly and the shaft gone 6 inches higher or lower, he would have walked away, unscathed.
Ayrton was acutely aware of his own mortality and used fear to control the extent of the boundaries he felt compelled to explore. He regarded racing as a metaphor for life and used driving as a means of self-discovery. He said "Every time I push, I find something more, again and again. But there is a contradiction. The same moment that you become the fastest, you are enormously fragile. Because in a split second, it can be gone. All of it. These two extremes contribute to knowing yourself deeper and deeper."
This message and idea stayed with me for a long while after the movie finished and made me think a lot about the life each of us are put on this earth to lead and how we absolutely never know how it will go. In a heartbeat it can be gone - just like that. So hard to comprehend but so important to remember......
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