By: Alfred Jensen
The author reflects on meaninglessness and chance through a personal anecdote.
Oh shit, are you serious? What a lame way to go.
At the time of writing this, I am exactly a year separated from a car accident in which I was nearly killed. The thought I had in the moment—or rather, the only thought I had time to even have—was resignation mixed with regret. They say “your life flashes before your eyes” in the instant before death, but in the critical 6 seconds of the accident—seeing a car barrelling towards my rear, the impact, and my car being launched across 3 lanes of highway traffic—I could only watch on stupefied, as my world crumbled.
And then my car came to a rest. I had survived.
Somehow, through luck as equally unbelievable as that of being hit in the first place, my car had cut a perfect path through three lanes of traffic (while spinning) and not hit anyone, only to land in a highway on-ramp, exactly as there was a gap long enough in the merging vehicles to brake and avoid me. The woman who hit me was not so lucky.
Registering that I was miraculously alive, I was able to snap out of my initial shock and register what was going on; everyone on the road, including I, had slowed due to a semi-truck partially stopped on the leftlane of the highway. A distracted driver had not noticed in time, rammed me at full speed (~80mph on those roads), and instantly turned our cars into billiard balls. Reflecting on this now, it was a few feet of relative positioning between her car and mine’s center of gravity that caused me to be thrown to the right, while causing her to careen to the left and slam into the stopped truck.
As I looked over to her car roughly 100 feet back, I saw that the front was essentially can-opened—she had hit the truck so hard that the first third of her car was wedged under the trailer. By the time I got to where she was, there was a small crowd of people around her car, including the driver of the stopped truck. She was still alive.
Her legs were broken and wedged into her car’s dashboard, which had become a mangled mouth of plastic, metal and smoke. The woman was unconscious, but she began to make choking sounds, to no movement from the crowd. Not understanding why no one was attempting to help, I tilted her head to allow the blood to flow away rather than into her lungs. She died in my hands a few minutes later. Both the police and paramedics later told me that even if there was an ambulance right behind her, she wouldn’t have lived—she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
Some stories don’t have a point, and this one doesn’t really either. As the police officer who took me to the hospital (blood draws are mandated in fatal crashes) kept saying, “this happens all the time”. Besides, compared to the motorcycle crash he was just at, this was a “much nicer scene”.
If we are to find a meaning in this story, perhaps we can view it as a thought exercise in human powerlessness to circumstance. A foot of misalignment to decide who lives and dies is as senseless as the difference in being born Queen Elizabeth, versus as a colonized native of Queen Elizabeth’s appropriated islands. If meaninglessness and chance dictate many of the most important events in our lives, throwing individuals into random fates with random labels of good, evil, friend, enemy, kin, stranger, etc. without respite, how do we begin to ascribe ethical truths that apply to all?
I have no idea—after all, I’m just a (seemingly) powerless human. But perhaps I can offer the obvious starting point: what could possibly be more meaningful and intentional than being kind to others, regardless of where the random hand of fate has placed them?
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