Near Misses
My granddaughter has just learned to wobble-run. She does so, carrying her hands like tiny purses in front of her armpits, where they act as natural backstops that spring out in immediate extension to protect her perfect face. The falling is just part of the moving. She seems to get that instinctively. It’s the price of doing business in an ambulatory life. Crashing doesn’t faze my girl. She just pops right back up like Gumby and goes on her way again. I’m the one on pins and needles. At least once a day I jolt—too late and too far away to prevent disaster. The tiny miracles of near misses punctuate our day.
Most of us keep a basket full of “what ifs” on a shelf within arm’s reach. It’s our inherent right that we seem to deem a privilege as human beings, to borrow trouble and keep a working list of ways to worry about what might be. Rightly so. The world is full of precarious corners. It’s a wonder any of us make it to the end of any day. The miracle of miracles that we forget to count.
Bad stuff happens. Really bad stuff. But mostly it doesn’t. Not when you think about it in proportion to what could. We pass through an intersection just milliseconds before a car barrels through the stop sign right behind where we just were. The tornado picks back up into the sky a quarter mile from our house. The scissors we drop don’t land on our toe. The fall that we took doesn’t end in a break. We dodge bullets all the time. We just have a hard time putting our near misses in the count-your-blessings bag.
Life moves with most of its crooks and turns being untraceable to a cause and an effect. Things just happen. And they don’t.
Life moves with most of its crooks and turns being untraceable to a cause and an effect. Things just happen. And they don’t. Our Boy Scout/ Girl Scout blood curdles at the realization that we don’t have much control.
As a coach, Injuries were always the unpredictable havoc wreaker on a season. In a sport like basketball, with such a small roster, the absence of one athlete lost to injury from the line-up changes everything within a flash. When one of our players would get hurt, turning our season upside down, the first place everyone’s brain went to visit was Explanation Land. Why did this have to happen? What did I do? What am I missing that this really unfortunate occurrence is going to help me find?
It’s as if filling in the blanks with reason and purpose could make a bad thing worth its while. Players would sometimes unpack events backward like a game of pin the tail on the donkey…”If I had just shot it when I was open instead of driving it…if I had only worked on my hamstrings…I should have stretched more before the game.” Coaches do it, too, “…If we had just not done the last rep of that drill…if we had practiced lighter the day before then her quad wouldn’t have been so fatigued… why did I call that lob play anyway?” We want there to be a reason. A place to place some blame. Our humanness aches for tangible logic. If we could just connect the dots, perhaps we could keep some of the bad stuff at bay.
So, my team and I created a “go to” mantra when we found ourselves tempted to ask, “Why me?” to all the bad. It was the follow-up requirement question, “Why me?” to all the good. We found it to be a quick recalibrator for healing woe is me. We also found that it got us thinking about all of the things that could have happened but for whatever reason, just never did. Like why didn’t Roz’s no-ACL-knee ever completely blow out? Or why didn’t Courtney ever sprain an ankle?
Invisible blessings float uncounted, though that doesn’t make them any less real.
We don’t naturally collect and catalog near misses, though. Negative impressions can be extremely hard to hold. But they still play important, defining roles. And they are EVERYWHERE. We escape all kinds of close encounters every single day. The big ones go in a “but for the grace of God” crate that we store in the top of the closet, while the little ones dissipate mostly without fanfare or recall.
Three weeks after our first child was born, my husband rolled the jeep he was driving down a rural road on his way to work. He had on his seat belt, he held on tightly to the steering wheel, and he stayed inside of the vehicle that had no top until it finally landed upright on four wheels. At the age of 28, he had a broken neck.
That happened, but so much else didn’t.
A few days later, he walked into the neurosurgeon’s office to get checked out --because his head had started feeling heavy--making him the first one of Dr. Stewart Smith’s patients with this particular set of vertebrae compressions to ever walk into his office on his own two feet. After a complicated surgery and a rather pesky rehab, my husband was good as new.
That sits in the grace of God box atop the closet in the hall.
Did he tuck his chin in at just the right time? Were his overdeveloped baseball shoulders responsible for the save? What kept the shattered fragments of his spinal cord from shooting out in every direction rendering him paralyzed? What made them form a pile, instead, that a gifted neurosurgeon could remove? The list of all that happened couldn’t touch the list of all that did not. The blessings came in buckets with little tags that read, “Near Miss.”
My newly mobile granddaughter prefers the driveway to the grass. And she prefers the downhill-uphill slopes of concrete to the plentiful stretches of level surface where I’d prefer she play. I live on red alert. As I scurry just a reach away—ahead, behind, beside—of this weeble in constant motion, I marvel at how many times a day we have almosts. But I mostly don’t remember them once they are gone. They co-mingle with the treasures she digs up inside the cement cracks. Additions to the list of marvelous wonders in our unpredictable lives.
Sherri Coale