There's a spot on highway 96 near Reynolds that draws my eye every time. It doesn't seem like much, but this is the exact place that, nearly 8 months ago, I was in a terrible car accident and totaled my truck. Driving by still sends waves of confusion and a deep cold sense of actuality straight to my heart, like ice. I don't know what to think, there are so many mixed emotions that come from it.
At first, I never wanted to drive by this place again. There are other routes to Columbus, Georgia, but my GPS seems to like to take me to this place a lot. I sucked up the courage back in December, though, promising I wouldn't think about it too much, wouldn't look for it...
But morbidly, of course, my eyes scanned the guardrail, and I knew immediately when I had found the place with the dent in the guardrail and the large concrete pole next to it that I saw looming at me as my vehicle flipped. I blinked for a second and heard screeching and smelled the burning, rubbery, oily smell of wreckage. The glass fragmenting. My eyes remember the blood stain on the bodice of my old Cinderella dress that won't come off. Tiny things as they are, they are all reminders. Terrible, powerful little things.
That will always be one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life. It, like being diagnosed with Diabetes, though, made me even more grateful for the life that God has given me. My accident was a terrible thing, but I somehow made it through the difficulty and survived past it. It made life harder, but I learned to adapt to the difficulty.
Many times in life I have caught myself wondering at God, saying, he hasn't given me more than I can handle, but he will push the limits... pretty damn far. And he does. I don't know why. To test us? To make us better people? To help us to earn strengths that will make us stronger people? Great blogging material for writers like me? I don't know.
Pain colours this world - pain lies behind the eyes of every individual who has felt it. Pain drives poetry and writing, painting and music. And joy does, too. Those two wonderful, terrible dichotomies of each other need the other to put the other into perspective. The greater the pain, the deeper the capacity for joy, I believe. The greater the challenges, the stronger you will be if you struggle past them and fight with all that you have. The greater the fire that will burn within you.
I am grateful to be alive and grateful to have been given the means and faculties to move past this traumatic event in my life. It is also a solemn reminder though, to take care and to remember how fragile life is. To laugh at the silly things and cherish the moments we have together. To remember that despite the terrible things, we have to learn to also confront them and find inner peace with the bad things that have happened to us. To breathe and let our heart strings, tight and painful, fall loose just a little bit so that our chest doesn't feel like it's about to snap... to keep pushing forward, to let our experiences shape us but not control us. To use them to empower ourselves and let them allow us to create the person we want to be. We all make choices when we decide how we want the moments of our lives to effect us. And we all make different choices - it's one of the ways in which we humans are all so different.
As I drive past the guardrail for maybe the last time - living in Atlanta will have me take a different route to Columbus - I think of all these things, I close my eyes for a brief moment, and simultaneously let go of and embrace my past for all that it is. I am alive, I am here, and my future lies before me - ready to be shaped in whatever way I see fit.
No comments:
Post a Comment