Mourning my father today, fresh and energized from a No Kings! protest yesterday down in the city, with a battery of other life dramas to manage, as always….
It’s just too much right now.
Today I hit a woman in my car. I mean I hit her with my car. It was accidental of course, yet it seems these days that is not always the case. Rainy afternoon, foggy, out running an errand. Saw a parking spot to my right, and had to reverse to maneuver into it. I was listening to a meditation tape ironically: “be spacious, be aware, be present”. Right. Looking in my rearview mirror, I saw a car coming but gauged the distance and knew I was safe enough to reverse, that he would surely see my back up lights. He did, but the woman who walked behind my car at the moment, coming from the left, did not. Once a deer plowed into/onto my back windshield and boy I felt that. It shattered the window. She didn’t weigh as much as an adult deer. She started yelling though, and that’s how I knew. “Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God!!!!!
Oh my God! I was saying myself, silently. Time and space collided and I thought that she was really hurt, bleeding out on the pavement. It took me a minute, you see, to put my car in park and undo my seatbelt and get out of the car. Jesus. She had been heading for her vehicle and walked into my bumper on the driver’s side, and fortunately I wasn’t going so fast that she got knocked off her feet; she didn’t see me and I didn’t see her. I noted that she was carrying a six pack of beer, good for her! I ran toward her and asked her if she was ok, and she said yeh, yeh, yeh. But we were both stricken. I shook for 15 minutes, and I’m sure her shaking time topped that. I’ve never been hit by a car, have you?
Then I began to think how really sideways this situation could have gone. She might have had a gun, and assumed I did it on purpose! And shot my ass, on the spot. Or my tires anyway. I might have pushed on the gas too hard and ran her over. Imagine.
How tenuous life is. Siddhartha is known to have cautioned us: “Life is like a flash of lightening in the sky”. The quote buried in a classic reflection on impermanence (aka change) and death (the most profound change). He suggests we cozy up to the idea. Not in a morbid way, but to approach it with curiosity. Since it’s definitely going to happen, and we don’t necessarily know how, when or where.
This quote from Montaigne hits the nail on the head:
“Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. When death does come to them, their wives, their children, their friends, catching them unawares and unprepared then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair!
To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adapt a way clean contrary to that common one, let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it, let us have nothing more often in mind than death. We do not know where death awaits us so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom! A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
Avanti! until it’s done. pk
