Getting Hit by a Car Never Tasted So Good

"Only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility." 
– Tolstoy in My Confession

Got hit by a car today.  

Though I guess technically I rammed into her car, but I wasn't at fault.  

Let me backtrack a little first.  I’ve prayed lately to find a local dogsitting job because I’ve officially discovered that two things that make me happier than almost anything in the world:  little kids and dogs.   This is mostly because both these creatures don’t fear vulnerability.  They live life each day with undaunted zeal.  They are untainted by society’s curse and they love unconditionally; you’d actually have to labor to earn their disapproval.  Also our maturity levels are exactly the same.

I digress.  Today I receive a lesson in flat-tire changing 101 from a friend who shows me how to remove the sinister, punctured tube from my bike tire and replace it with another.  This is the same sinister tube that had disqualified me from my last triathlon because it ruptured as I trudged up a hill. 

Don’t worry, the tube suffered too. 

I proceed to violently strangle, curse out, and stomp on the punctured tube, because my dad and I theorize that some inanimate objects have lives and spirits and seek only to infuriate us; they deserve to be punished.  I then toss the tire into a volcano and watch it burn (just mentally, unfortunately).  

So I mount Marge (my trusty bike) for the first time in months, and rather irrationally decide not to wear a helmet for the commute to class.  Poor decision.  

I’m riding merrily down the bike path, when all of the sudden a woman rolls all-too-eagerly through a two-way stop sign to cross an intersection directly in front of me.  She is full steam ahead, and there is no way to avoid collision. 

CLONK!

I go down epically and lie in shock as the woman frantically scurries over from her car, asking if I’m okay.  I assure her I'm fine, jump up once some of the temporary shock abates, and check both vehicles for damage (there was none – though I expected to see a gaping Meghan-shaped hole in her automobile). As I’m scrutinizing the SUV’s black exterior,  I notice two furry creatures in her backseat.  I excitedly tell Veronica (we’re buddies by now) that she can redeem herself from hitting me with her car if she lets me play with her dogs.  She stares at me, blinking, asking me if I’m sure I’m okay.  I reassure her and ask if she needs a dog-sitter.  Conveniently, she tells me that her beloved dog-sitter has just moved to Florida and they’ve been searching for a new one. 

– I’m your girl, I tell her.  

– This is fate, she concedes.

We depart with a hug, and she tells me she’ll call me soon to watch her dogs.  

God practically stared me in the face during this experience.  He set up this uncanny answer to my prayers and literally runs me into a neighbor who can set me up with some cash and some puppies.  It’s like he’s saying, c’mon – what more do you need to believe?  If I’m reading this too spiritually and just choosing to construe it in a positive light, I don’t care.  I want to believe there's something supernatural lurking behind this experience.  Sure, most people would be pretty pissed off if a chick almost killed them as she blissfully blew through a stop sign, but I’d like to cook up a different meaning for it:  we both learned powerful lessons today. She realized she needed to drive with more caution and awareness, and I realized that helmets must ALWAYS lay atop my head when two wheels roll beneath me.  In fact I might even start wearing one in the car.  

Experiences are what you make of them.  Our present selves always have the freedom to manipulate (for better or for worse) what our past selves have done. 

The movie Memento explores this idea: the main character represents not a single, unified self that endures unbroken over time, but rather as a series of different selves. 

In the film, Leonard (Guy Pearce) has a condition that prevents him from making new memories, thus his short term memory is similar to that of a fish.  Every time he "wakes up," he is forced to live only with his present self, which he struggles with throughout the film.  His meaning in life is not based on a goal that he has chosen for himself, but is rather derived from a purpose or goal that he has inherited, or that has been implanted in him, from a previous self.  

A present self can have experiences and form new memories that will change one's seemingly fixed memories of  long-gone past. Thus the meaning of the past and the grip that it has on a person can be altered by the decisions one makes within one's present experience.  

In other words, one is inescapably responsible not only for the decisions one makes as a "present self," but also – indirectly – for the meanings one inherits from "past selves." Thus, we must always "wake up" with a past that gives meaning to our life.  We always have the freedom to transform the meaning of the past – and transform the hold that it has on us – through the decisions we make in the present.  This idea of discovering optimism by developing interpretation strategies is explored further in "Defamiliarizing the Familiar" as well: http://invigoratetheordinary.blogspot.com/2011/02/defamiliarizing-familiar.html .

So in choosing to view these events in both a didactic and rather fortunate light, I come to realize that I can extrapolate plenty of positivity from any experience.  Because of the bike accident, I will forever rock my stylish biker helmet,  I will be more cautious while riding a bike, and I will dogsit some of the cutest puppies I've seen in a while (and make a fortune doing so – she pays big $$).  

The flavor of every experience can taste terrific; it all depends on how you cook it up.  Inventing your life (and that's exactly what we're doing – inventing our experiences) by using poor ingredients or by failing to nurture it, as you should with any good meal, will produce disastrous results.  But spice things up with a zesty chipper outlook, and you have yourself a masterpiece.  Life instantly becomes delicious. 

Nothing but a potential mild concussion and an upper thigh abrasion can keep me from feeling like this whole thing happened for a very good reason; and I'm sure I entertained at least one person with this tale.  

I do believe that getting hit by a car never has tasted quite so good.

Full Disclosure

"Oh to live to be the ruler of life, not a slave - to dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, roll on, float on!"

-Walt Whitman

I challenge you: what embodies beauty moreso than uninhibited vulnerability?  Why hide our imperfect centers? We should, instead, excitedly peal our masks and reveal our absolute truths to all.  I've discovered the liberation –the freedom– that swells when we practice thrusting our true selves unto others with zealous vigor. When the spirit, which is trapped by the body, reveals itself, we appear naked before the world. We radiate. Truth and beauty finally get the OK to venture out and meet the world.

I sit down to write about vulnerability. Turns out I had a stream of mental diarrhea (pardon the imagery) patiently awaiting departure.  In the name of full disclosure, in the name of nakedness to all and uninhibited vulnerability... my mental diarrhea, folks:

People crowd the building as if there's nowhere else to go.  They cannot transcend; they know not where to look or how to swim upstream.  They pack themselves into a frenzy without bothering to look up.  We should use our eyes more, we should detect the good in people.  We should never let the system tell us what to believe or who to trust.  Trust in ourselves, in God, and we transcend.

Do we not have total freedom?  At any moment, in any given situation, we are never trapped.  The chains which have held us are only the chains which we've made (Jewel).  Listen to yourself and tell yourself the truth.

No one can make you feel stupid, worthless, small.  You are an impenetrable membrane.  If others fail to find the light in you, they struggle to find their own.  We walk with oh-so-fertile minds, welcoming poison from every direction.  WHY DO THIS?  Is it not enough to know that we are here, that we have been created, that no one is any more or less than ourselves, that we all live out each day as part of an interconnected web of creatures who share more in common than in difference?

Worms will feed upon us all.  So why the judgement, the ignorance, the hate - such ugliness when our moment to live is but a spec in eternity?  That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.  What will your verse be? (Walt Whitman)

And what is more, we cannot be content to just make others suffer. No, we too must suffer at the mercy of ourselves.  The fear that we will never be good enough destroys everything good about ourselves.

Man is nothing but the total sum of his actions.  I give meaning to my life.  I am here, I will labor, I will die.  Three truths. Knowing these truths, will we immerse or will we detach? Thought and reason give birth to meaning and so a meaningful life will materialize if I think it to.

The supreme treasure of vulnerability.  Make yourself naked to the world.  Show all color - what do you have to hide? We live, love, labor, and die.  Let no one put out your light.  Shine from within through all darkness.  That your light may light another's.  Be free, infant creature.  Bear all your scars, your wounds, your beauty and bear them well.  An undaunted roar of being.  Soften a wrinkle and dance, laugh, play, sing.  Hum, hum sweet melodious life – connect with all.  The perfect being in all its imperfection spread-legged in silty dirt.   Sound the triumphant chorus of your soul.

Defamiliarizing the Familiar

“Literature is not a window for looking at sociological themes or philosophic ideas or biographical information; it is a mural or wall painting, something with a palpability of its own which arrests the eye and merits study”  -Rivkin and Ryan

Invigorating the ordinary means defamiliarizing ourselves with a colorless world and guzzling up the beauty that surrounds us.  Viktor Shklovsky believes that literature rattles us, forcing us to rediscover ordinary life. 

Leo Tolstoy presents a meditation on property from the point of view of a horse, who recounts the story of a flogging in a vivid and brutal manner.  Tolstoy awakens our senses and captivates us as he tells an unbearable story from a new point of view, as if we discover the act of flogging for the first time.  Literature presents objects or experiences from such an unusual perspective or in such unconventional language that our habitual, ordinary, rote perceptions of those things are disturbed.  How often do we get to feel the thrill of experiencing something for the first time?  Literature invites us to do this whenever we please.  “Habitualization devours life and deadens everything,” writes Shklovsky.  So much value resides in tradition and routine, but when life becomes a series of mechanical, automatic actions, we may be in danger of not actually living. Like Lester Burnham in “American Beauty” before he experiences his revelation, we become merely automatons, trudging through the motions of life.  When we read Literature, however, we recover the sensation of life – we get to feel again.    

“It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.”  -Stanley Fish

Literature also enables us to develop interpretive strategies that can empower us to be happy.   Allow me to explain:  Stanley Fish theorizes that authors never actually write a text, nor does the text exist as a reality itself – he suggests instead that the reader is responsible for writing the text at the moment when he interprets it.  

To exemplify this claim, Fish asks his class (studying Christian symbols) to interpret the “poem” they see on the blackboard.  In actuality the “poem” they see is merely the previous class’s homework assignment jotted down on the board:

Jacobs-Rosenbaum

Levin

Thorne

Hayes

Ohman (?)

The Christian symbol hunters feverishly assign each word a biblical metaphor, resulting in the final analytical triumph of discovering that the most prominent letters in the “poem,” were S, O, N, – an obvious reference to Jesus Christ.  

The point Fish makes is that interpreters do not decode poems or literature; they make them.  This idea can be transferred into our lives beyond paper as well – we might even say that all objects and events are made by the perceiver and are not found; they are instead created by the interpretive strategies that we set in motion.  You with me? In other words, any time we experience something, we create it based on specific interpretation strategies we’ve developed.  

Thus, I’ve discovered the secret to optimism: we can always choose whether or not to embrace what we experience by altering our interpretive strategies.  Literature teaches us to develop new strategies.  If we use the same interpretive strategy to write everything, it’ll all be the same. 

The message Fish gives us is not that Literature and poetry may not possess qualities that attract a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic or literary qualities.  In other words – we “write” into our lives whatever we pay attention to, and not the other way around.  I recognize the audacity of this claim, and it can of course be argued that we are not, in fact, the authors of our lives at all but instead vessels in which either a) a cultural matrix simply channels through us (meaning that we can’t ever “write” anything without societal/cultural influence on our perceptions or b) God or a Holy Spirit channels through us and controls what we “write” for ourselves.  

Regardless, Fish’s argument defamiliarizes us and gives us a recipe for optimism: let’s develop an interpretive strategy that will allow us to focus predominantly on recognizing beauty and joy.  Literature not only liberates us from monotony, but it also forces us to develop our own interpretive strategies to find meaning and happiness in the world. 

However, in the name of Fish’s theory, I am fully aware that you will agree with me on this only if you already agreed with me.