The Rest of Your Life

Hello, audience. For those of you who don't know, I got hit by a car last week. I was jaywalking and not paying attention and I stepped right in front of a car. After the trip to the hospital and all the scans and x-rays and such, it turns out the only real damage was the gash in my head. They closed it up with stitches and ten staples, and I got the staples pulled out yesterday morning. Doctor says it healed up nicely, but now I get to have a scar on the side of my head for the rest of my life.

That's a weird thing to say, the rest of your life. When you think about the rest of your life, how far ahead are you looking? Sixty? Eighty? A full hundred? Where do you draw the line for a vague amount of time like that? How long do people think they are going to live? It's a tenuous thread, this existence we have. Everyday, we walk a line between life and death, an incredibly narrow edge. That show, 1000 Ways To Die makes a lot of jokes about death, and that's interesting to me. That we created a way to entertain ourselves with ridiculous stories of other people's deaths. But the show is right. There really are an innumerable number of ways, everyday, that people face down the potential of death and never know it.

I've thought about it a couple times, the potential to have avoided what happened last week. I thought about stopping to head back to the house and grab something ten or fifteen minutes into my walk before I decided it was too late and I should just keep going. I thought about how I could have scheduled the meeting I was on my way to on a different day instead. I thought about ho I could have just been a little more patient and just waited at the crosswalk. But none of that happened.

Don't get me wrong. My injuries are pretty mild considering my accident. Another guy came into the ER the same day from a similar accident. He had a broken collarbone and pelvis along with a veritable assortment of other injuries. I'm lucky that I got off with so little. I don't want pity or sympathy for my injuries. They're mine, bought and paid for. I get to deal with them, and I'm trying to do it without unnecessary complaint. I'm also trying not to be completely bullheaded and refuse help or sympathy when it's offered.

One of the things that weirds me out most is all the people who are super shocked and worried when they find out I was hit by a car. I'm upright and walking around on my own without a cast or neck brace and only the one bandage on my hand. Sure, I'm not in perfect health, but I'm obviously not dead. It's as if they immediately assume I should be on my death bed because of what happened.

It's moments like that that make me reconsider how normal the way I think must be. Should I be more in awe of how little I was hurt? Should I be super freaked out or weeping in thanks for my life? I feel like I should be considering my own mortality and rethinking my religious choices or something, but I'm mostly uninterested in that line of thought. It seems pointless to try and attribute what happened to fate or chance or the mysterious workings of some greater being trying to give me a sign or something like that.

My purpose for relating this topic to my accident comes mostly out of interest in how uninterested I am in the typical thoughts (or what I would consider to be the typical thoughts) one has after an accident like mine.

I was thinking to myself the other day about what it must be like to be dying and to know you don't have a lot of time left to live. To know that the clock is ticking down, that your life is definitely coming to a close. It has to be an incredibly surreal experience, one that is really hard to wrap your head all the way around. I can only wonder what I'd do at that point.

Life is long. I've probably only lived for about a quarter of what I can expect my full lifespan to be and I already feel old. I'm still only just getting started. I'm still unsure of where I want to go or what I want to do with my life. I don't now what the future looks like. I don't know how much time I have left. I do know that I'd like to travel. That I'd like to play music, and maybe to write seriously. I want to get married and have children someday. I want to have and adventure of a life that I can tell stories about. I want to live and breathe and experience and be in awe of this incredible world we live in.

There's a line in the song Polaris by The Human Abstract that sends a chill down my spine and leaves me breathless every time I hear it, or even think about it really.

"All the paths I've been down, I still have never found something lasting through the years but all these worthless fears that mean nothing. Compare your life, your love, to the vastness of the endless stars above."

This is my most favorite image ever. It's a picture of earth taken by the Voyager space craft as it left our solar system. For those of you who haven't seen this before, Earth is the pale blue dot in the middle of the yellowish beam of light on the right side of the picture. Here's a famous quote by Carl Sagan about it:

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

It's crazy to think about how tiny and insignificant we are compared to the entire rest of the universe we exist in. To think about the vast emptiness of space, the thousands of billions of planets and moons and asteroids floating endlessly around stars, titanic collections of plasma and gases that burn and rage with such unmatched fury and intensity and beauty that our minds can hardly conceive of their devastating power. I have a love of stars because they're so impossibly powerful and uncontrollable and immense.

My life will probably never make a huge impact on this planet, let alone the universe at large. I'm very likely going to be just another one of millions who were born, who lived, and who died here. I'll have some sort of impact, for good or for bad, on the people around me. But that's not really my goal. I'm not out to make a huge impact or to change the world or the way millions think or see life. I just want to have a life full of living, full of experience and emotion and thought. A life that burned with the fire and passion of even the tiniest momentary flash of heat from a star.