A Word to the Meek

I hadn’t had much sleep and I was driving late at night with my new wife asleep in the seat next to me—I can’t even begin to explain what it is like to love her—and we were going out of town down this shitty two-lane country road with absolutely no lights except for the brights of oncoming traffic and there were tons of those stupid deer that lift their heads up when they see you and dare. So anyways there were four hours ahead of me and I thought about them. There were four hours, 240 minutes, of concentrating on the road. That means keeping the car from flying into a ditch, or into oncoming traffic, which was, I’ll mention again, only about four feet away from our car, and concentrating on keeping those deer from driving me into a suicide pact with them. Concentrating fully. Concentrating without fail at 60 miles an hour.

I started to get nauseous.

When you drive, it is necessary to forget the fear of death. It’s just part of the contract. Because when you remember it how easy it would be for your explosion powered ton of steel to turn instantly into an execution carriage, it makes driving difficult.

I wasn’t giving the road my full attention because my imagination was taking me step by step through an intersection with one of those deer. How its horns would pierce the windshield and plunge at 60 miles an hour into my beautiful sleeping wife’s breast. How I would see it after it happened because my eyes would be closed during the impact and how we’d have swerved off the road. And I would be all alone under the darkness of the sky trying to figure out what to do without any cell phone reception. How my shirt would turn red as it soaked up her blood, bright with oxygen from her lung.

It’s almost enough to make you stay home. Lock all the doors and spend the day under the bed.

I know, I know. This is imaginative faculty. It’s up there to create situations and send us through them so that we’ll be prepared for real life, like that holograph chamber on the Enterprise. I know that it can get out of control if you don’t have sufficient discipline, and that the kind of thinking I was engaged in on that road trip was irrational, something verging on the territory of stress thinking, which everyone agrees is harmful.

But it’s also not all in your head. Growing up means knowing that you aren’t invincible, you aren’t lucky, and you aren’t magically impervious to harm. Bad things do happen, and some day everyone that you know will die. Imagination is life that you’re sifting through.

And life is uncertain.

But also, uncertainty is life. The big mystery. You have no idea what the fuck will happen tomorrow. And in the end, you don’t have any control over any of it either.

We walk in this cloud of uncertainty that bounces off all of our predictions and ideas, that gapes in front of us with its riddling smile wherever we go, arbitrarily spitting out the good with the awful in doses diluted by the mundane.

I couldn't let anything happen to that beautiful woman in the seat next to me. And I couldn't pull over or be toppled by all of those fears of uncertainty. So I faced into that howling something and denied what might be with the audacity to demand what I wanted out of the uncertainty of life. We had plans to keep.

There is some kind of power in not knowing. In being the person who perseveres blindly through that shimmering black cloud that leads to the future. It is a bold act to butt up against all of that uncertainty. But living is facing uncertainty. You have to bear up against all of those death traps set in life and walk into it. You are bold every minute of your life.

We should take that power and remember it in the small tasks that don’t require us to be bold at all by comparison. Telling the truth, saying what needs to be said, or sticking up for someone who needs it risks a lot less neck than you already did by opening your eyes this morning.

And when you really do need it, these small acts prepare you for dignity and courage, to have boldness when you need it most.