On June 22, 2009 I was in Rome Italy. I had a good day. I woke up early, wandered down to the garden behind the hotel, and wrote some morning pages while I had a cup of tea. Then there was breakfast and a wander over to the Vittorio Emanuele monument. Then there was some lunch at a fabulous restaurant, you know the kind hidden up an alley, which had been recommened to me by a friend. In the afternoon, a little wander around and stumbling on a random, 1000+ year-old ruin just right in the middle of the sidewalk.
On June 22, 2009 in Washington, DC nine people died in the worst crash in Metro rail’s history not five minutes outside “my” Metro stop.
Some things have changed in the past year, most notably that Metro has gone to full manual control on the trains which means that instead of a smooth ride with predictable motion I’m often forced to wonder “Does the person driving this train drive his car like that too?” and “Did we just run over something or is one of the wheels on this car square?”
One of the things that I’ve noticed change in the past year is boarding patterns. Right after I got home from my vacation I noticed something odd in the morning commute: virtually no one was getting on the first or the last car of the train. During the evening commute, mostly those two cars were filled with tourists, and trust me they are easy to spot. Given the way the two trains involved in the June 2009 crash smashed together, and given where the fatalities were, this boarding pattern did not surprise. But gradually over the last year it has subsided out of necessity; even the most fearful commuter would rather have a seat than sway in the aisle every single day in both directions on the off chance a train might crash. Take a careful look at photo number 41 in this gallery and then read the caption to get a better picture of just how overloaded Metro really is.
So I found myself on the 22nd of June 2010 staring out the back door of the last car on the train as we made our way along the tracks to “my” Metro station wondering what I would do if I saw another train come up behind us looking like it wasn’t going to stop. And all I could think about was how to balance being prepared to exit life at a moment’s notice with the reality of having to live life on a daily basis.
Maybe it’s because I’m sitting smack in the middle of my life and I realize that every day, every single minute even, is a gift that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Maybe it’s because I am a student of human nature and I realize that it isn’t in us inherently to look around, pay attention, and understand that you can’t rely on your future self to do what your current self is to lazy, preoccupied, or just unwilling to do no matter how much you say whatever it is you aren’t doing is something you value. Or maybe it’s just that my priorities are shifting again and so I think about these things, about what’s important and what’s not.
The only thing I know for sure is that the bulk of us are totally unprepared for the one absolute certainty about life.
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