Yesterday, while biking at a furious pace to check-out a book and photocopy it in time for a noon deadline, I found myself skidding almost completely sideways for 20 feet at 19 miles an hour. My bike tilted from the normal 90 degrees to the ground in slow motion. 80 degrees. 70 degrees. As it did so, my brain managed to register the high pitch squealing coming from my tires, a squeal which was abruptly stopped when my pedal slammed into the ground and bounced me back to a normal, upright riding position. I laughed nervously, and continued biking.
Turbo Minivan - I’d just like to point out how unbelievably cool it is that this guy turbocharged the same model as my first car: an old-school 1980s Dodge Caravan / Plymouth (Chrysler) Voyager.
The closest I ever came to dying was over two years ago. Like many teenage near-death experiences, this one was entirely unexpected and so quickly recovered from that it barely registered as a blip on my adolescent radar screen. And yet, looking back now, I can frame the event in my mind: an inch or two one way, a half second more slowly or quickly, and I would exist either in a vegetative state or as a memory of existence, whose tenure on earth would be marked in cold marble on a sunny hill near a church in Woodbury.
After you complete a set of bench presses, you “rack” a long bar on a steel support above you. This places the center of the bar directly above your forehead. One workout, I set the bar down carelessly, resting its left side on the bevelled edge of the rack, rather than securely on it. As I rocked myself into a sitting position, I felt a 185 pound bar graze the back of my head, crashing like a piledriver to the floor. Had I gotten up a moment later, the bar would have directly met my forehead as I rocked upright, and would have slammed by head back to the bench, concentrating its entire downward momentum on a single point on my skull.
This story is not interesting because I did not die. However, it got me thinking just how much I take my life for granted. True, humans are not built to take joy with each new day - we are built to assume, gloss over, take for granted … but these are traits worth overcoming.
I have decided to remind myself of life. Not as some heavy-handed philosophical exercise, but as a way to be Happy. That reminder will take a musical form: I will play more piano, record another album, love the gift of 15 years of playing that I have been given. Plan your own reminder, too - we’ll try this together.