Life Is Not A Linear Business

Life is not a linear business. A brutal reminder shoved this back into my face a few days back when I came within three feet of dying violently, and not the graceful way I have long preferred.

Walking home from the pub around the corner is a quiet five minute affair. After a couple pints of craft brewed honey pilsner I am in a mellow and quiet place. I sit in the pub for a couple of hours a few times a week, reading or taking notes for blog posts or story ideas. Every so often I meet a friend or my brother or run into someone I know. Being at the pub is some of my “people time”, the time I spend away from my internal world of writing. It helps remind me that I am not totally alone. The wonderful and friendly staff knows what I’ll be drinking from the moment I walk in, and they have it on my table before I fully sit down. It’s that kind of place, part of the neighbourhood where I choose to live, made up of regulars. Folks who walk there, and home again.

A few days back I’m walking home, crossing the street fifty feet from my front door, and I come within three feet of being a messy new hood ornament on a Nissan Pathfinder. It was about ten years old, light green, clean and looked after. The white guy behind the wheel had medium length brown hair, and one of those half beards that surround the upper lip and chin but not the cheeks. He was one the guys that look stupid wearing it, the kind of guy who wore a mullet 5 years too long. He had just come tearing down the street, speeding through the 30kmh Playground Zone in the adjacent block, and roared into the roundabout outside my apartment nearly taking the front end off a car that already had the right of way. He was driving so fast I wasn’t aware of him until the other car hit the horn.

Then he sees me, already in his path and slams on the brakes, nearly riding up the curb, and my legs. Please try and understand that it takes a lot to make me angry. Few people have seen it, and those that have remember it well and wish they didn't. I choose to live my life quietly, serendipitously, with some thought, and some reason, and when possible foresight. And I have learned to accept that life is a non-linear event, made up of random occurrences and thoughts.

I was quite angry. Many years ago I was trained to use my voice in such a way as to get people’s attention when needed. Control of pitch, volume, and tone are essential when trying to cut through panic and disorder. So I used my best “Command” voice, the one that is loud, succinct, and authoritative. The one the entire neighbourhood suddenly heard and then went silent. Of course I also used my best “Charlton Heston as angry Moses” arm gesture to point directly at our hero’s head while uttering only three words: “YOU – SLOW DOWN!”

Ever since the incompetent engineers that work for the city where I live took out the Stop signs and installed the roundabout, the amount of traffic on my once quiet side street has tripled. They moved the Stop signs a block down to slow the traffic that was using that street as a raceway. Most drivers treat my roundabout as nothing more than a politely challenging chicane. They patently ignore the adjacent block long playground zone, clearly marked at 30kmh, and feel it is their God given right to run over the safety rights of whatever children and seniors that happen to be in their way. After all, how dare anyone get in “their” way? 

Well, I guess I did. It was a nice warm late afternoon when I started crossing the road, a residential side street that doesn’t have lines painted on it. I passed two women chatting on the corner, their adorable small dogs looking on quietly. I was two thirds of the way across when the horn sounded from the driver who had been cut off by our wayward Nissan. I looked up and saw our hero just in time for he and I to both stop abruptly. Three feet away, the distance from my spine to the end of my fingertips, with one very small side step I could have placed my hand on his hood.

The speeding in the playground zone has always been a pet peeve. A lot of years ago I spent many hours of volunteer time working in the field with my local police on traffic safety issues. I even have a nice certificate from the major insurance company here in B.C. thanking me for my commitment to road safety. Speeding in playground zones is not a policing priority, something I understand from experience. However, how can a city redistribute traffic flow so substantially in a neighbourhood to direct it through a speed controlled Playground Zone and not follow up?

So back to the whole non-linear thing. It’s like this, many more years ago than I care to admit, I was in a car accident. The kind that screws up your shoulders and neck, and results in your beloved car never gracing your driveway ever again. The kind that results from the other party making an illegal turn into a one way street, and then going through a red light they can’t see because the light is facing the other way. The kind that happens at 3 a.m. on a Halloween night when you’re on the way home from working a night shift, and going through a green light you can see, on a mostly deserted downtown street.

So far we have only random elements converging on a common point, non-linear lives and activities, unconnected. And then they all collide, t-boned is the common phrase, at a blind corner due to the buildings being right up against the sidewalk. My car hits a pickup truck right behind the passenger door. My car comes to a stop in half a car length; I bang my head on the door post as the car spins 180 degrees, and then come to a stop facing back the way I came, into oncoming headlights. I catch a glimpse of the pickup spinning off down the other street.

Downtown streets in the early morning, more random elements collide. A security guard sees what happens and calls it in, so does a limo load of people behind me. Witnesses to a random collision. Non-linear elements suddenly in the same space. In the end the pickup driver is cited for several infractions. The witnesses all tell the same story, that I had the green light and wasn’t speeding and the pickup coming from the wrong direction. I’m covered.

In the days that followed as I endured insurance visits, doctor visits, sorted out how I couldn’t work, and began physiotherapy I began to realize how non-linear the sequence of events was, and how if even one of those elements had been 1 second later or earlier how different would have been the outcome? Besides the obvious I realized “what if” the limo had been going slightly faster? I would have been hit twice. Then because after such events the human brain sometimes wants existential and spiritual validation, you run the all the permutations over and over, move the variables, the decimal points, the positions of people and cars, and you come to realize that the only variables that mattered were the ones that actually collided with your politely non-linear life. All the other stuff is madness to contemplate, but you have to do it at least once in your life, to make sure the anchor of your life is the awareness that you are alive. You might see yourself as a seemingly random element in a non-linear world, but our innocent and random choices have results and sometimes unintended consequences.

I once did an interview with an executive of a packaged tour travel company. She was interested in the Key West road trip and as I told her of the places and people, she confessed she would be afraid of making a wrong turn and getting lost. So I confessed to her that I had never been “lost”, but sometimes I wound up taking a wrong turn and seeing some places I hadn’t expected. I also told her that was part of the adventure, that the unexpected showed me more than I wanted or thought. Like my experiences at the Negro League’s Baseball Museum or the discovery of the massive War Memorial in Kansas City, or the visit to Harry Truman’s Presidential Library, or how I saw and felt about Mount Rushmore and Little Big Horn.

The non-linear events that mark us, shape us, and form us. The random thoughts that happen late at night, or early morning, or driving, or while sitting next to a random stranger and beginning a conversation that blossoms into a strong friendship. The thoughts we all have that change lives and lead to “ah-hah!” moments.  How much random and non-linear is your life? How much random and non-linear do you allow for, or permit, or even deny?

All of these events and more went through my mind as I quietly walked away from the Nissan. Once more I was walking away from being an arm’s length away from dying violently, again at the hands of a self-involved driver. The only sound that I heard after I finished crossing was the Nissan speeding off down my street, speeding to the Stop sign at the other end of the block. I didn’t hear the women resume their conversation, or the other car drive off, but I knew that both would resume their personal journeys quickly. The guy that leaned on the horn would say “that was close”, the two women would say “What the…?” and the dogs would just stay adorable. All of them random, non-linear, unconnected elements, all safe, until the next time unrelated elements are needed to collide.