[1096] Your Turn

Whether I wanted to or not, the moment calls for writing. My friend and business partner’s wife was in a bad car accident. As of this writing, whether or not she is alive is uncertain. When these kinds of tragedies hit, for me, certain things snap into focus. Major questions about our working assumptions rise straight to the top.

It’s freezing. Whatever else I may discover to say while writing this, most of the country is cold as fuck and I’ve been particularly so with my poorly insulated fort house. The roads aren’t great, and I’ve had just enough slippage while driving my country roads to remind me of the standing precarity of winter. I’ve slowed down to let several, bolder idiots, pass me, invariably in Jeeps, “4-wheel drives,” or SUVs. I’ve had enough scares and slides off the road to build the extra 20 minutes into my patience.

Many people drive as though black ice, hills, or other drivers aren’t a thing. I’ve dipped my toes into a few days of Door Dashing, and I swear the general behavior of cars on the road is hard to believe. I’ve been a delivery boy in the past. I’ve driven a cab. I’ve driven all over the state of Indiana in service to visit supervision and my DCS responsibilities. I’ve spent an obscene amount of time behind the wheel, and I’ve never felt more under threat than I do today. I also watched a documentary recently that seemed to back up my instinct showing an increase in accidents and death due, in part, to disingenuous oversized car designs.

We all, myself included, treat driving as “just another thing.” We’re in the U.S. You have to drive everywhere for anything. For all the people who instinctively say “Well you’re so far away from everything!” about my living conditions have never timed themselves in traffic heading to the mall or work that’s “just up the road.” It’s the kind of thing you build instincts about that you don’t even realize unless someone points them out to you. It’ll speak to your budget, how much time you think you do or don’t have, jobs you can take, or if you have a truck, things like moving tasks and preparing for winter by weighing down the bed.

It would take a major catastrophe or revolution to get you to think differently about your life in a way that genuinely considered not having a car. You’d have to be plugged into a system with robust, safe, and clean transportation or where most of your needs were within walking distance. If you hit a high financial status you could ensure someone was transporting you or transporting things to you. The benefits and pitfalls of car ownership are a quasi-universal accepted norm. We accept the pollution, how many people die, the unfair and unreasonable costs of insurance, and the insane price tags for the concurrent status and head turns.

We don’t imagine every time we hop in our car that it might be for the last time. It might even be considered a kind of pathological thought pattern to concern ourselves with that thought too deeply or too often. A tire popping at the exact wrong time or a swerving truck or drunk speed runner might be modern analogies for the dangerous animal lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce and eat us. If you’ve watched any nature documentary, the second the prey escapes, it’s back to life as usual. We might have considerably better odds of surviving our encounters, but we falter through the same slack in our awareness, bad lack, or along lines of thinking that take a world of things for granted.

In and of itself, to take something for granted is simply how we operate. Your brain makes shortcuts to condense and map the world. If you haven’t died in a car accident for 35 years, you’ve got tens of thousands of times and hours suggesting today won’t be the day. It doesn’t mean you forgo your seatbelt, or that you make it a point to venture out in the shittiest of shit weather, but it does mean that you may have drifted into a space that doesn't keep your guard up. Combine this baseline disposition with any other thing that’s going on that day like stressors, a phone call, bad weather, you’re tired, the kids screaming in the back, etc. and it's a wonder we’re not crashing more often than we already do.

How do we treat the crash when it occurs? It’s almost a statistical inevitability, at least as much as heart disease or cancer. Are we left in shock? Did we believe it was a real possibility all along, or are we paradoxically now demanded to wrestle with a previously inconceivable reality? In fact, there are decades of industry and oversight designed to make thinking about such a reality increasingly hard to do. What did we think about our car, or loved ones in it, before the crash? Here is where my sensibility of the world comes to a head.

I think about death constantly. I don’t do 90% of the things I do unless I’m asking myself what example I’d wish to set if I died tomorrow. I’m asking myself if I’ll give a shit about a decision 60 years from now presuming I’ll make it to 100. I’m entertaining contingency plans for when the ideas or people I attempt to invest in inevitably flake and metaphorically die. I think about why you do or don’t choose to be bold and direct and honest as though you have forever to find a space that you can share and celebrate or draw strength from. When I think about my friend’s wife potentially dying, I’m worried for him, because I think he’s afflicted with the same assumptions almost everyone carries - that we’ll live forever.

I can’t help but to speak to reason ten million I hate religion. It’s an emotionally salient training mechanism to pretend that right now doesn’t matter. And every time it betrays you or its adherents betray when they allegedly believe, like magic, it turns into an excuse to double down and profess that much harder. I can’t look away from the hundreds of believers I’ve witnessed losing someone who just don’t seem convinced they’re gonna see that loved one again one day. It’s not in their face and eyes. It’s as if every wasted opportunity while they were alive becomes a basin of infinite guilt. Should you not rejoice knowing they made it “home” before you? Aren’t you relieved that cosmic/karmic justice came for your bubble? Of course you aren’t.

We want it both ways. We want to feel good when our support systems support us and we want to feel good about taking for granted and taking advantage of those systems. We want the comfort of our good nature and good deeds to overrule the alligator capitalizing on our innocent drink. We act as though the ambivalence of nature or existence isn’t the thing to contend with. We act like we’re not in a constant state of flux, neither good nor bad, and none of us gets out alive.

My friend is as hard-working and self-sacrificing of a person as I’ve ever met. As if anyone “deserves” tragedy, he’s not the one you’d wish it on. He’s still under a spell of bad assumptions. It manifests as stress his doctor has warned him about. It manifests as a kind of trolley losing more and more control as it barrels down the rails. It’s still on the rails, but no one on board believes they're going to survive the dramatic stop. I worry that whether or not she survives, he isn’t in the place to take the example as a cue to slow down and smell the roses. How can you? How can you think that in the wake of tragedy, or losing the love of your life, that it’s the time to root through reasons to keep going? There’s “romantic” schools of thought that would powerfully assert he should follow her.

One of the themes of many of my clients who struggle with addiction was an inability to effectively grieve. People they lost years ago might as well have been yesterday. Every year around the time the person died was difficult for the months leading up to it and for weeks or months after. They were essentially stuck in the pain and confusion of what that person represented for them. It’s easy to get stuck in those places when you’re lost in the story of your relationships versus the practice and exercise of them. How do you resolve something that, maybe in a deeply important way, doesn’t actually exist save the story you’re telling about it? What if you don’t even realize that until the story is ripped away from you?