The pillar won

Some years ago I had a stretch of about a year and a half when everything was going well and I was travelling at warp speed. So much to do, all of it at once, and I was enjoying it. Too busy to sit still, but I would take some time next week. Or next month.

You probably know how this ends.

One day I pulled into an underground parking lot with a BlackBerry in one hand and an iPod in my lap. There was a large concrete pillar. The pillar and I had a disagreement, and the pillar won.

My youngest, Gray, had a phrase for this sort of thing at the time: "a giant huge crash". He was right.

I can still hear it. I remember sitting there thinking, I did not seriously just do that. I am a good driver with a clean record. But I had not been driving. I had been doing four other things in a moving car.

It was an expensive lesson, approximately $3,000 worth, and I did wonder why lessons cannot come a little cheaper. But a car is only a thing. I was fine, apart from the ego, and nobody else was hurt.

So what is the lesson here?

I have trained myself to ask that question when things go wrong, and this time the answer was not complicated. Stop. Slow down. Pay attention to the one thing in front of you.

I knew all of that. I taught it. A busy year had quietly taken it away from me, which is how it usually goes. Nobody decides to stop paying attention.

So I put the iPod away, turned the BlackBerry off and sat in the car for a while. Then I booked a few weeks off that summer. It took a concrete pillar to make me schedule a holiday.

The universe has a sense of humour

Here is the part I have saved for last. I was listening to something on the iPod when I hit the pillar. It was a lecture by a well known Rinpoche on the importance of meditation, and he had just reached the section on placing the mind and training it not to wander.

I am still learning.

If your own life is moving at that speed, please take the cheap version of this lesson. Seven minutes of sitting still tomorrow morning, before the phone. It costs a good deal less than a body shop.

From the archive. First written for my journal years ago, and rewritten for life after 50.