BANG!

So I’m sitting at the junction of the Loop and Slide Road this morning, minding my own business and waiting for a break in the traffic so I can head north on Slide Road, when BANG! A huge jolt, with a simultaneous huge thundercrack of sound, scaring me half out of my wits, and I realize: holy crap, I have just been rear-ended.

It was not that serious. Of course, it was some youngster driving his Dad’s car, or at least the car was in his Dad’s name. I have no idea what distracted the kid; when I looked in the rear view mirror I didn’t see a cell phone, but he could have dropped it by then, or he could just as easily been fiddling around with the radio, or taken the ramp too quickly to stop, or he could have just been in La-La Land. Either way, he got the worst of it -- I have a Honda CRV, and that big spare tire on the rear end of the car saved my car’s bacon, but did quite a pitiful job on his; I had a teeny little dent behind the tire, but his right front lights were smashed and the hood and front fender bent up.

An interesting thing happens to me in unexpected situations like this. I’ve only been in one other wreck – MUCH more serious – but I observed the same thing. When it happens, I feel an initial surge of shock and intense anger. (Like today, when I whirled around and yelled “What the &*%$ is the matter with you!” although I doubt he heard that, unless he reads lips.) This dissipates in about 5-10 seconds, after which I feel pretty calm and go into a sort of “OK, now what needs to be done” mode. I don’t know if this would be true if I were bleeding all over the place or had a dead passenger, but fortunately, knock wood, I haven’t had to find that out.

When I got out of the car I didn’t yell at the kid or even chastise him; I just looked over both cars with him, took his information, gave him mine, and told him that “these things happen” and “we were both very lucky that no one got hurt,” and “It could have been much worse.” I did scold him a little and tell him that he needed to be more careful, but at that point I think he was just relieved that I wasn’t screaming at him, or that I wasn’t some cowboy with a shotgun. I didn’t call the police; I decided that it wasn’t serious enough to cause a traffic jam on the busiest street in Lubbock at 10:45 in the morning, so we just drove away. My guess is that I will probably hear from his insurance company, or his Dad, or both.

After that, I calmly drove away and did the following:

1) visited my mechanic to make sure I was correct that there was no damage;
2) called my insurance company to report that it had happened and tell them my side of the story, just in case Junior gets creative with his explanation of the incident;
3) at the insurance company’s request, filed a crash report with the police, who told me that I did everything correctly and it was not necessary to call the police in the case of a fender-bender where there were no injuries;
4) called the insurance company again to report that I didn’t have some of the information they asked for, and was assured that I had enough info and it was OK.

So basically it was not that big a deal. But during the course of all this, I realized that this “calm” thing that happens is actually not cool level-headedness. I think it’s some kind of protective biological thing. You may not be freaking out, but you’re actually not thinking completely clearly. I realized that although I had felt “in control” (hah), I was actually quite shaken up – for example, I didn’t notice what make of car the other guy was driving, and you’d think that would be a no-brainer. I only knew it was crumpled in the front, and it was red. I also realized that my neck hurt. Shit! How can I have whiplash when my car isn’t even damaged? I also felt very disoriented. That’s when I started to feel really upset. Coyotebanjo graciously offered to have lunch with me, and after that I went to the chiropractor (whom I had just seen, since I managed to give myself a slightly swollen disk sitting on the diabolical chairs at Viol Conclave wrestling with an instrument I didn’t know how to hold yet.) He re-adjusted everything and put my neck back where it was supposed to be quite handily. (Digression: I’ve heard there are bad chiropractors out there, just as there are bad doctors and everything else, but chiropractors have improved the quality of my life consistently since the first time I managed to yank my 3-year old arm slightly out of its little socket and old Dr Fiske stuck it back in; I thought he was Jesus. Over the subsequent years I watched him put my stonemason Dad back together dozens of times. I have had nothing but good luck with chiropractors ever since, including the two I see now, one of whom once brought Coyotebanjo from being an immobile agonized wreck lying on the floor to a condition of walking upright in the space of about 20 minutes.)

So I’m OK now; I’m sitting in a comfy chair, with an Advil doing its work. But the real thing that stays with you after an incident like this is how fast and how unexpectedly something really screwed up can happen to you. We all know this, of course, and see examples of it every day, but until it hits you on your own noggin, it doesn’t really sink in. We have all these great plans for our lives, and of course that’s not a bad thing, but at the same time we don’t know what the hell is going to happen to us from one moment to the next.

About 12 years ago I was in a serious car accident in Bloomington, Indiana. I was going down a main road at about 25-30 mph when some cub scout in his Firebird ran a stop sign on a side street and T-boned my car on the left. Fortunately I saw him shooting out from behind the trees just in time to swerve my car sharply to the right, so he hit me an angle instead of directly hitting the driver’s side. (The cops told me this quick-thinking move is what saved me from serious injury or worse.) The sound of two vehicles colliding like that is indescribable; it gave me nightmares for weeks, and brought the inhabitants of the neighborhood at 10th and Lincoln streaming out of their houses like ants. Both cars were totaled. After climbing out of the steaming wreck, I stood there bewildered; my car was a complete accordion, but I appeared to be suffering nothing more serious than a seat-belt welt, a torn dress, an aching toe and a jolting but not-serious bump to the head. My hands and my head hurt, but nothing else hurt. I could not believe that I could be uninjured. I was so flabbergasted by this that, having read one too many near-death-experience books, I actually walked over to the totaled car and looked into it to see if my dead body was in it (my Tibetan monk friends laughed uproariously when I told them I had done this.) When I realized I was in fact not dead, I opened the car door and started gathering up all the junk in the back seat, because I had a bunch of CDs in there, some of which I had borrowed and needed to return. At the time, I felt like I was being very level-headed; I realized later that it was crackers. (My car’s a steaming wreck; let’s check to see if our physical body is still in there, and oh by the way let’s get the CDs out.) When the paramedics came, they all rushed over to both cars; half of them started removing the poor bleeding (but OK) kid from the Firebird, and the others looked confused, and then ran over to me a said “Where’s the driver of the white car?” I said “I’m the driver of the white car,” and they just stared at me for a moment. One of them finally said (in disbelief) “You’rethe driver of the white car?” I guess I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. At that point they all went bananas with questions, but all I remember is saying “My hands hurt, and I think I bumped my head, but I’m not injured.” They tried to drag me to the hospital, but I steadfastly refused – can’t they see that I’m fine? They kept asking me my name, how old I was, and questions like “Who is the President?” while I stood there thinking “Why are they asking me all this crazy shit? The kid in the Firebird is covered with blood!” Finally, after the cops came and took all the reports, the cops put me and the driver of the Firebird in the squad car. I remember asking the kid if he was OK, and he said “Yes” and said he was sorry, and I said it was “OK.” I insisted on being taken back to work, which they did; when I got to work, Coyotebanjo ran over to me and said “What happened?” and that’s when I collapsed sobbing in a chair.

That night, I remember thinking that I could have been killed in a flash; and when the enormity of that had sunk in, so did the dharma lesson that comes with it, which is that any of us could die at any moment. I remember thinking that if I had been killed, and if in fact any part of our consciousness as-we-know-it survives death (a big if), I would not have regretted the way my life had gone. Even though I was a penniless graduate student, I had followed the path I wanted to follow, and I felt pretty good about the choices I had made and the things I had accomplished. I told several of my friends about this, and in fact one of them reminded me of it many years later after he had a health scare, and said that he had felt the same way.

The sad mystery of this is that it is no longer true, and I can’t quite articulate why. Oh, I still believe that my life for the most part has been fine, and very fortunate -- as I said in my “Great Wall of China” post, I had an experience up there that reminded me that I have had a lot of remarkable experiences, and enjoyed the fruits of a lot of good karma, and that I am deeply grateful for all of it and for the life I’ve been privileged to lead. But, whether because of more focused spiritual practice, or because more people I love have grown old and died (or didn’t grow old and died anyhow), I seem to feel a greater awareness now of all the things I could have / should have done, or said, or decided differently; of the consequences of my actions and choices, and of things that I have not done. And when I have an experience in which one is reminded of the tenuous nature of our existence, I seem to have the overwhelming inner response I’m not finished with this one yet. Why? Perhaps there is something urgent that still needs to be done; but at the same time, I feel quite convinced that most of us will still feel as though we’re “not finished” while lying on our death-beds. I only know of one way to deal with that conundrum, and that is to muddle along and try daily to remain mindful of the old Zen dictum: do not waste your life. That holds true whether you believe that you will simply become compost, or if you believe that in addition to becoming compost your "continuum of consciousness" will continue in some way. For that matter, if you believe the latter, you aren't finished, are you? And if you've taken the Bodhisattva vow to return and help other sentient beings "as long as space remains," you ain't gonna be finished for a long, long time.