Tragedy struck someone I knew recently. A woman I work with at the Northampton Big Y, a supervisor of mine, lost her sister in a freak accident. The girl, her younger sister, was, as far as I know, killed underneath the wheels of a tractor-trailer, leaving behind a 2-year-old daughter. She was 21 years old.
Just 21. Only a few months older than I am. She was my age – our age. She could have been someone who went here. And her death coincided with the tragic case of a man dying after falling off the Superman ride at the Six Flags in Agawam. And a few months after my aunt died from complications resulting from cancer (she wasn’t even 60 yet). And about 2 and a half years since a pair of hijacked airplanes brought down two concrete towers in the most famous city on Earth, killing a few thousand innocent people and triggering a war with a staggering death toll.
That sister could have been me.
It happened the day before my first day of sophomore classes. I was struck down by a pick-up truck while crossing a road in Hadley. I was pretty damn lucky if you think about. I got out of it with just one single broken bone – a metatarsil in my left foot – and some severe soft tissue damage. It helped that the driver had the decency to honk his horn before he hit me, so that I could at least attempt to spin out of his way. So I got clipped, knocked down, my foot run over and – in a state of utter, adrenaline-pounding shock – got up and jogged over to the bus for home. I was that guy comedian Dane Cook was making fun of at the recent Comedy Central 13th anniversary bar mitzvah – the guy who walked away from being hit by a car as if it were no big deal.
It was a big deal though (God, I realized that later). It was a big deal because the Three Sisters of Fate decided not to cut the strings of my life that sunny Tuesday morning. Had the horn not sounded, had I looked in that direction just a fraction of a second too late … I would have been hit dead on by that truck. And what happened could have been a hell of a lot worse.
What could have happened? It’s not something I’m keen to reflect on. I could have died, or, at the very least, become paralyzed. Whatever happened, it wouldn’t have been pretty.
And yet, at the time, I shrugged it off. The whole incident became a big joke to me and my friends – a kind of therapy through humor – but it didn’t profoundly affect me like these kinds of events should. I didn’t see the light or God; I didn’t feel as though I needed to make a change. I drifted through life as I normally did, the only difference being I had tree branches growing out of my armpits for about three months afterward.
Then my co-worker’s sister dies and old wounds, neglected wounds, are opened up again in my psyche. It cemented feelings that had been stirring in me for a while, feelings that I can’t quite describe … trapped, maybe? Feelings that I was leaning back against the rails and letting my life drift by me, disappearing to times as I laid back and watched it go. Like a lightning rod in a high gale, these electric swirls of distrubance and emotion had something to ground them, to channel these frustrations into a course of action.
As my own 21st birthday rapidly approaches, I’ve begun to take stock of my life as it is now and I’ve come to some harsh realizations. I’ve come to realize that I’ve spent my life in cowardice, running to the comforts of safety and conformity despite my belief that I was a budding nonconformist. Too many days of my youth have slipped by without me ever taking hold of it, using it to experience everything that it has to offer me. Instead, I’ve sat down and done the same old things – woke up, gone to school, gone to work – and have never even attempted to realize my ambitions, of which I have many. I’m the guy who had endless dreams … and then ignored those dreams, coming up with excuses to justify why.
The worst thing that I can imagine is that I awake at 35 and have all the trappings of the American Dream: wife, two kids in the suburbs with the white picket fence and steady, well-paying job at the bank or insurance agency. I have all that but I never followed my dreams, never did the things I wanted to do. To me, that’s worse than death.
The band Autopilot Off named themselves that because that believed in living life just like that – with your own personal autopilot switched in the off position. And it’s a perfectly fine philosophy to live by. Which is why this is likely to be one of the last documents I’ll write for this lovely establishment. I’ve decided to move on with my life. I’m probably leaving school prematurely to go on and pursue the life that I had always wanted but was too scared, deep down, to pursue. I want to start that band I’ve been itching to form, write those screenplays and novels that have been swirling around in my head, learn the things I’ve been saying I’ve wanted to learn (photography, skateboarding, etc.). School is not a bad thing, but I think I’ve learned all I needed to learn from it and to continue forcing smething that does not feel right, just for the sake of a society that values a college degree no matter how useless (or useful) it may end up being in life.
Once you finish a chapter in your life, you can’t stay reading it, or you will be living an unhappy and unfulfilling life. And me, being a fast reader, I have finished this chapter. And though it’s a scary thought about what lies ahead of me I’ve learned that it’s better to leap into the void.
In life there’s three things to remember:
Take the risk.
Follow your heart.
Regret nothing.
Johnny Donaldson is a Collegian columnist.
