Ask anyone whose been in an earthquake -- the very world beneath you cracks open and you desperately lose all sense of control. Several notches down on the disaster scale is suddenly plunging into a total white-out...!
What a few minutes before had been a snowy county highway abruptly exploded into the white violence of a Midwestern snow squall. Incredible! The flood of white is smashing into your windshield with a force that nearly drives you off the road. The road...? You can't see it. Not the road, not your hood, not a blessed thing even though you know you must be sardined into a stream of speeding cars in front and behind you. Each equally blinded, each trying to slow, but each unable to judge the precise speed of the cars around it.
The cliche about your life speeding by you -- entirely true. As you face the prospect of careening into a 50-mile an hour collision on a jammed highway you can't see or hear, images flash into your mind. How short a life it's really been...how little I've understood...the people I love somewhere far far away...how many of us out here in white hell will end up in a tangle of metal...how many will survive...God almighty am I dreaming all this!
In fact, the next thing I clearly recall was my head hurting as it pressed down on a horn that wouldn't stop blaring. Something, somebody, was pounding on the car window. Words? Screams? At first not sure.
The point is this. Our cars did survive the squall. All 10 or 15 of us. The thick blanket of snow somehow cushioned the collisions enough so that cars not drivers were crumpled. A miracle? A coincidence? A 30-minute winter aberration? Take your choice. All this driver knows is your life actually is a play that actually does have a plot line.
The thing of it is, we small players rarely take a seat in the audience to realize this. Or to know which act of it we're in right now. For a little scary while, that whirlwind of snow on a dangerous highway suddenly tornadoed me off the stage and into the seats. Is that a little like how God sees us...? If so, now what do I do about it...?
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I love your last paragraph!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear you survived!
I think people get so busy and caught up in life they forget sometimes to live it, and like you said, how short it is. I guess to see it "from the seats" like you did, must be quite a different perspective!
Emily -- you and I are tracking here!!
ReplyDeleteAh, Jack. You are perhaps more used to seeing life from the safety of the stage. It is a strange, wonderful, frightening thing to "be" in the middle of the experience and not just telling about it.
ReplyDeletePS: Now I get your last comment to me on FB regarding new blogs. And, yes, I see you do have one. Excellent.
Annie, you're indisputably right. Being "in" the moment is wonderful and frightening. Perhaps it's my age that allows (excuses?) me from staying in the moment as long as I once did. You sound like carpe diem is your code...?
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