Recently, I was involved in a pretty serious car crash. My mom and I were passengers in the back of a taxi, in a remote location of the world. The last thing I remember thinking was that the driver was driving way too fast and I could smell alcohol in the car. Then, the last thing I saw was a car approaching us from the left, followed almost immediately by the last thing I heard - the horrific screaching of breaks giving out on the damp pavement. When I woke up, my head felt like it would burst from the pain and my mother was lying in my lap, her head resting on my thighs, her full hair covering her face. I tried to wake her up, she was unresponsive, and I continued to scream for help, for an ambulance, for someone to wake up from the daze we all were in. I started to notice that there was more than one car piled into the driver's side of our taxi. I also noticed our driver just starting to regain consciousness. I could see the petrified looks on everyone's face around us because of my screams and cries for help. I alternately would try to wake up my mom and hold my head to try and calm my own pain. I felt around the scull for blood, but it all seemed to be still in one piece. Then, I moved my mother's hair to see if she was bleeding, but she was unscratched also. The thick windshield glass was all over her clothing. "Mommie, mommie, mommie!" I kept screaming, not knowing what else to say. Then, slowly, my mother started to answer my cries and when I asked her how she felt she said "fine, why?" When I asked her why she was lying down like that, she told me quite sure of herself "I am just relaxing a little..." I guess when one asks a stupid question, one gets a stupid answer, right?! Funny, the things one says and remembers in a moment like that. After it was all said and done, we walked away with bruises, some more serious than others, but completely WHOLE. We walked away from an accident that could have been... Well, I will stop trying to see the alternate outcomes for it - one minute later, one second earlier, two feet's distance to the left, etc.
The challenge for me has been to try and figure out WHY. I simply cannot accept that it was all for nothing, that our trip was ruined for nothing, that our plans were destroyed for nothing, that we got all banged up for nothing. Nothing is just simply an accident. I realized, through the calm and silence that I needed to come back to being to my own self - in the days following the accident - that I had become complacent before the crash. I had grown used to having my good life, my great friends, my amazing mother, my interesting job. I wasn't thankful anymore for the birds in the trees, the sun in the sky, the great people I meet every day in the most mundane of circumstances, the magic that surrounds my existence. It is a cliche that when people have a near death or tragic experience they come back smelling the flowers and loving life. It hasn't been so dramatic for me, but I do realize that the message for me was to stop worrying about getting it all done now, and understand that things which are worth having and doing and accomplishing will always wait for the right moment. Whatever cannot be done today, can be picked up tomorrow. And that maybe it is true that when it is time for us to go, we go.