You Must Leave the House

I was driving late at night with my new wife dozing in the seat next to me down a winding country road with no lights and lots of deer. There were four hours of driving ahead of me and the pressure of concentrating for the duration about bowled me over. I felt nauseous, unsure whether I'd be able to make it there or not. Then there were the other cars on the road. Trucks towing tractors shaking on their hinges. When you drive it is necessary to forget the fear of death. It is quite possible to never imagine the worst possibilities. In my state of mind I was tracing out those horrors viscerally. The horns would plunge through the windshield at 70 miles an hour and into Victoria's breast. The tractor would fall off of its hinges, bounce and spin on the road a few times before coming down on our subcompact and crushing us. Except crushing isn't so simple as the word. It bends metal all around you, broken glass into you, bones compact upwards in a horrible instant until the whole roof caves in and the cavern of the car swallows you up. And supposing I did survive either of these. What would I do if my wife was injured? Drag her out? And if I didn't have cell phone service? Wrap my shirt around her and watch it turn red as she died in my arms? These were some of the possibilities facing me in that car ride. This is life. Anything can happen. There is no rule that says horrible things can't happen to me. They can. In as many ways as there are to live. It is almost enough to make one stay home to know that all of these death traps are waiting in the world. But you can not stay home. You must leave the house, because the uncertainty of what will befall you is also that of what won't. Though there are unavoidable dangers in the world, it is not in your power to control them. And knowing that you have no control and no foresight means that you also have no power to change what happens. In this way it is a bold act to leave the house, to live. But we must be bold. We are bold in every thing that we do, most of the time without even recognizing it. Bold because of the things that we can't control, which in darkened imaginations are the demise of all that we hold close. This makes the other tasks in which we toil seem meek in comparison. Speaking up for someone risks a whole lot less of your neck than getting in your car and getting on the highway. And when we do face disaster, it is these minor acts of boldness that prepare us to act with dignity and courage, to have boldness when we need it most.