I was in a wreck last week.
It wasn't a big one, though I was sandwiched between two cars like the creme filling in an SUV-shaped Oreo. I have a hole in my front bumper the size of a standard trailer hitch, and my neck was sore for a small time.
As it happened, I was on my way to a performance, already running tight on time. But the audience won’t wait, so I exchanged insurance + snapped photos + sped off toward Fort Worth, where my fake eyelashes and pushup bra waited for me.
Most humbling about the whole thing was this: I’ve never been a great driver. I’m easily distracted + have a terrible sense of direction + go too fast too often. But this time, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was being good. Not texting and driving. Not speeding. I was sitting at a stop light, eating my dinner out of tupperware, minding my business—BAM!
-Cheryl Strayed, Wild
I’ve been languishing on lots of projects lately—my musical is at the top of the second act, outlined and ready to be written. My novel is at the literal halfway mark, the remainder also outlined, also waiting. And then there’s me. Looking at these projects. Wishing they were done. Listening to the hum of the deadlines I’ve created for myself as they go whizzing past.
People think it was the Buddha who said, “Trouble is, you think you have time.” It wasn’t. It was Jack Kornfield, an author and Buddhist teacher, often attributed to rewriting the teachings of the Buddha to appeal to Westerners.
Whoever actually said it doesn’t really matter. They were right. I have lazed around under the broken philosophy that I have time to get stuff done. Time to get to the theatre. Time to finish the project(s).
There isn’t a single guarantee written anywhere that has assured me this. It’s a fiction I’ve invented, just like the ones I’ve outlined and have yet to execute.
Too little reading. Too little writing. Far too much navel-gazing.
What’re you trying to do and dragging your feet on? Will it help you to hear, like it helped me, that you will literally never feel like doing it? So stop waiting. Just eat the frog. Do the damn thing.
Or maybe wait until a coupla tons of steel crash into you. For the stubborn jerks among us—(Hi.)—it is one of Life’s Great Mercies to be woken up by a thing that could have just as easily killed you.
I’m awake! I’m awake. I’ll stop hitting the snooze, Universe. Thank you for the reminder that all things, Life as well as Bumpers, are finite.