Randomness

Yep, that's my car.

I got hit by a car yesterday, or I should say a truck slammed into my car in a parking lot with me and my kids in the car.  We are all fine, which is great, but still there is a lot of crap to deal with.

A lot of things had to come together to put me in that parking lot at that exact moment.  In fact, it almost feels like it was fated to happen.  First of all, it happened in the parking lot of my dentist office.  I was taking my oldest in to get her cavities filled--if only we had been better at flossing.    Second, her original appointment was scheduled for last week, but she got sick, so we had to reschedule.  They offered me an earlier spot, but I asked for a later appointment (I’m not much of a morning person).  And third, when I was getting ready, I almost took a shower, but I decided to skip it since it would make us late.  Now I wish I had been five minutes late.  It feels like the universe arranged all these events to put me in that parking lot at that time, so my poor car could be wrecked.

But why?  Why would fate want my car to be wrecked?  To teach the other driver to next time look before he backs up?  Maybe my accident saved some poor kid on a bicycle from getting ran over.  Or did I need to learn to be more assertive and honk earlier, or just grow from the experience of dealing with a car wreck? 

I don’t think so.  I think it just happened.

I’ve been driving for…hmmm, I don’t want to really calculate it, let’s just say for over fifteen years, and this was my first car accident.  With the number of cars on the road and the amount of time I spend driving, it really is surprising that I haven’t been in an accident earlier. There probably have been plenty of times when I made small choices that kept me from getting in car accidents that I don’t even know about.  I think the odds were stacked against me.

When I was young, my older brother got into a car accident.  His friend was a new driver, and he was driving a little too fast and lost control of the car and hit a tree.  Neither my brother nor his friend were wearing seat belts, but the friend was thrown from the car and died instantly and my brother stayed in and lived.

Physics kept my brother in the car, but small permutations in the direction and the speed and a hundred other little factors could have dramatically changed the outcome.  My brother could’ve been the one lowered into a grave at the age of seventeen.

I remember family members believing that my brother surviving the crash was a miracle that God had spared him.  They believed there was a reason he survived, that he had some great purpose.  But what makes my brother more important than his friend?  Why should my family get a miracle and his friend’s get a tragedy?  I do believe in God, but having him choose to save one life and let another die doesn’t fit my idea of God. 

Picture taken by me.  I love sunsets.

But it seems to me that we, humans (at least most of us), want there to be a reason behind these things.   We want there to be a purpose to tragic events.    We don’t like randomness, we like patterns and purpose because they give us the illusion that we have some control over what happens to us, that if we can learn something from the tragic event, we can stop it from happening next time. 

I think this is why random acts of violence like the tragedy in Aurora disturb us so much.  We understand crimes of passion, murder for inheritance, and even gang violence to some extent.  And because we understand the motives, we feel we have some control in preventing these things from happening to us.  But in these random shootings, there is no logic, there is no pattern, there is no way to protect ourselves and our families from these tragic events.  All we can do is play the odds.  And even when the odds are greatly stacked in our favor, it still leaves us feeling powerless.  

And in that powerlessness, we need to feel some semblance of control.  I think this is why we need stories.

We may not always see them, but stories are made up of patterns.  Even when the story is not predictable, the pattern is.  Everything that happens in a story has a reason, and eventually all threads tie together, building towards the climax.  Everything in the story has a purpose.  There is a sense of control in a story that we don’t have in real life, and I think that is what makes a story meaningful and satisfying.  Seeing in the story that control that we wish we had in real life.

I think we need a place where everything makes sense; where even when bad things happen, we know lessons will be learned and hearts changed, and all that suffering will have a purpose.  Stories give us that, and I think we need it.

Maybe our lives are nothing more than a series of random events strung together (or maybe it’s not, but only seems that way), but that isn’t necessarily bad.   We are made from those random events.  Our experiences, even the minor ones, shape us into who we are.  How different would you be if even small moments in your life were changed?  Just because there is no reason for these things to happen to us, it doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from them and grow and change.   And maybe stories can inspire us to look for opportunities to grow and embrace that change, so we can find meaning in events that had none.

Or maybe I just hit my head a little too hard during my car accident.  J

~MaryAnn

Disaster Strikes

Yesterday morning started out like most mornings. I woke up five minutes before the 5:30am alarm. (Why do I do that anyway and not enjoy those last five minutes of sleep? Especially when I regularly go to bed near midnight.) Anyway, up and stumbling around I woke the two oldest munchkins with orders to get a move on. #2 child is an early bird and far more chipper than anyone has a right to be when it’s still dark outside. He’s been known to break into song and dance, which is not received kindly by #1 child who can only speak in grunts until he’s had his cup of hot cocoa.

After I got them off to their early morning classes, there was a half hour before the next munchkin needed to hit the showers. The day was starting to hum along in its regular schedule and so I headed for the computer to get a little writing done. Ha, just kidding. I’m much more like child #1 except that my morning fix isn’t cocoa, it’s checking  blogs, mail, celebrity gossip and just about anything other than writing.

My computer is really a little netbook. A very beloved little netbook just a smidge bigger than a hardback book. It’s been with me for nearly my entire writing career (okay, which hasn’t even been two years, but, hey…), and yeah, it’s getting a little old. The battery died and I haven’t replaced it so I have to use a cord. And the cord has a short in it so I have to duct tape it in the magic position so it runs. Because of all the hardwiring, my netbook isn’t as portable as it used to be. No longer can I snuggle up in bed with it and binge-watch Netflix, or lounge in the car while waiting for the kids. Now it just sits plugged in at my Ikea desk. But it’s still my baby.

Although I’m not prepared to let my netbook move on to a better place yet, I do try to be realistic about its future chances of survival. I’ve taken to keeping my novel saved on a jump drive plugged in pretty much permanently to the side of the netbook. Yesterday morning that jump drive blinked reproachfully at me as I booted up, reminding me that I really needed to be writing about Pearl and Dyln and not reading the latest about Heidi and Seal. Finally I decided that what I really needed was a cup of hot cocoa.

Sometime when disaster strikes everything decelerates into slow motion. You can see every detail of what’s happening, and it seems that if your muscles could only move fast enough you could avert impending doom – except that you never can. Well, when I scooted out my chair it wasn’t like that at all. It was fast, and over in the blink of an eye. Unbeknownst to me my netbook’s power cord was wrapped around the chair leg. It took less than a second for the whole thing to fly off the table and land on the jump drive side with the sickening crunch of bent metal and busted plastic.

That drive was utterly mangled, destroyed, finished. Was I numb? Was there weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth? Did I see my novel flash before my eyes and know that over a year’s worth of work was wasted?

Well, actually, no. I am usually so bad at remembering to save things. But I swear, angels must have been whispering in my ears last week. For no discernible reason at all to me, I decided to back up everything I had on Dropbox. And just to be on the safe side I emailed myself a copy of my novel.  (It was a good thing, too, because I’d done something wrong and Dropbox only had a copy of my novel from November.) I can’t even imagine what my mental state would be right now if I hadn’t taken the few seconds to do that.

So, if you’ve read this cautionary tale this far, here’s a bit of wisdom – BACK UP YOUR STUFF.

Oh, and after all that, even though the jump drive is toast, my dear little netbook is still kicking. I’m writing this post on it at this very moment.

What’s the best way you’ve found to keep your writing safe?

~ Susan