Teaching opportunities surround us everyday. The fact that we see and take advantage of them is what is so rare. It can be as simple as helping a kid you don’t know with his books or doing your homework and getting off the Internet. Good choices, as well as bad choices, affect everything.
If a good choice affects our life for the better, we feel compelled to share it with others and help them make good choices as well. However, if we make a bad choice, hiding from it is not the answer. We must not only accept the fact that it can’t be reversed, but understand it can be a lesson. We must understand the lesson, grow from it, and eventually influence the lives around us for the better. We have to use our voices to make it known. No matter what we do, there are consequences for our actions, and all of our actions are results from the choices we make.
In just this first semester of my senior year, I have begun to see the world in a new light. I feel old and young at the same time, experienced, yet totally new to everything. The second I think I have figured out one mystery, a new one interrupts my thoughts and reminds me, “Hey, you don’t have it all figured out yet.”
Friday, Jan. 13, 2012. I rolled my car three times. I wasn’t texting or even putting on my makeup. I just barely reached over in the passenger seat to keep my stuff from falling in the floorboard while coming off a hill, driving the speed limit. Taking my eyes off the road for just a second was all it took. When I looked back up, I was headed off the narrow shoulder and into the ditch.
I panicked. I swerved.
I was just a few months away from having my first car for a year. I didn’t want to ruin it, so I swerved. The adrenaline that kicked in made me swerve harder than I meant to and I was heading toward the other lane. Seeing another car coming a little ways away, I swerved the other way, back towards the ditch I tried to avoid.
I knew I had lost control of the car. Knowing there was a row of small trees and a field on the other side of the ditch, I let go, hoping I would just run down in the ditch a little and stop. I covered my face with my hands as I felt the force of gravity throw me and my Honda Civic coupe into a blue tornado, mixed with dirt and rock. I remember screaming, “Jesus, protect me. Please, please. Protect me.”
A jolt ran through my body as the car lost momentum. Where was I? Was I in the field? I didn’t know. Cautiously I opened my eyes and examined my hands for cuts or scrapes. I looked out my driver’s side window and noticed the grass was growing the wrong way. I became aware of the fact that the seatbelt was the only thing holding me in my overturned car. There were a few houses nearby and I didn’t know if anyone had heard or seen the crash. I honked the horn and held it down so someone would help me. The men in the other car stopped, moved the rocks from my door and carefully helped me out. They were first aid certified.
I thought things like that happened to other people, not me. I was a great driver; I had never even hit anything or anyone before. Since that wreck, I have been so careful when I drive. I’m a terrible back seat driver now. I always tell people to watch the road and not to worry about the radio, because I know what can happen. My fireman father told me that he has seen people not walk away from a lot less scary accident.
For two weeks, I refused to get behind the wheel. I didn’t even really like riding in the car. I remembered what had happened, and my body remembered the injuries. I refused to let it happen again, and that’s when my mom sat me down and told me not to be afraid and completely stop living life because of this.
“Driving is a serious business,” Dale, my stepdad said. He always said that. Everyday. Now it I actually understood what he meant.
“This is a lesson, Hoot,” my mom said. “Now you know to be more careful about driving.”
As teenagers, we think we have everything figured out and that we are invincible. The unknown, consequences, lessons, troubles and hurt, they are all very real, and it doesn’t matter how many times a day our parents, principal or teachers tell us that we don’t know as much as we think we do, it never sinks in until something shocks us to our cores. Dwelling on the negative is a passive way of dealing with any situation. Dwelling on it for a little while is inevitable, but never moving on is dangerous.
Listening to those with more life experience than us is not at the top of the list of fun things we want to do. It should, however, be at the top of the list of things we must do. Before we realize what they mean, adult’s words seem redundant and annoying after hearing it every single day, but they are lifesavers. I know I will be the same way my parents are to me now when I have kids later. I’ll try to drill it in their heads that actions have consequences, no matter what the actions are.
After this trying semester, I have learned to heed the warning of those more experienced than me, share it, and try to get others to understand. I am the type of person to want to tell everyone what I’ve learned and some magical connection to be made and everything is great and everyone begins to think like I do. That almost never happens.
We don’t know it all and probably never will, but the first step to knowing anything at all is never passing on an opportunity to learn, even if the event that made it click is hard to go through once, much less remember it. It’s in the way we perceive it.
