This happened quite some time ago, but it has given me pause every now and then.The highway at the end of our street is usually heavy with traffic and at certain times can be almost impossible to enter, let alone cross over to go in the other direction. To facilitate the people who live in the streets running off the highway, there is a side road which allows access; what they call a service road. With the help of the mud map on the left, I'll try and explain what happened on this day.
My normal practice, when approaching the highway from our street, is to pull up at the stop sign, make sure no one is coming down the service road, then proceed across the service road, stop where the blue "X" is and wait until there is a sufficient break in the traffic to allow me onto the highway. All done in a reasonably fluid motion.
On this particular day, for some reason I stopped at the stop sign and stayed there, even though nothing was coming down the service road. I must have sat there for at least half a minute before realising where I was. I thought to myself "What am I sitting here for?" and prepared to move off when a car driving along the highway suddenly locked its brakes and skidded into the spot where I would normally have been sitting waiting. It quickly became obvious that the woman driving the other car had realised she was going to miss the turn off and had slammed on her brakes in an attempt to still make it. All I could think of was that where she had stopped her slide was where I would have been if, for some reason, I hadn't been sitting at the stop sign daydreaming.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it?
2 comments:
When I get to heaven, I expect to find a few angels with very bedraggled wings. They'll be the ones who have saved me from myself and others in the car - sometimes by only a hair's breadth, or should I say a wing's depth. Perhaps, a mathematician might say this is random. One Australian mathematician is getting lots of invites on the basis of her 12 bonk theory! Then those of us who search for meaning think of other things: God's intervention, our time's not up yet. Sometimes, I have the feeling of a parallel universe that informs the one which I inhabit. From this parallel universe comes deja vu, intimations of the future, unexplained interventions such as yours. Some of us think that one day we will be in a place where all this becomes clear. But, for me, it just goes to show there is something beyond what our not so large brains comprehend, something beyond our current rationality.
Sure does make you wonder...they say everything happens for a reason. You're obviously meant to be here a bit longer! I hope so anyway - I still need that B.J.
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