5 Lessons I Learned After Being Hit By A Car

Good Day CycSport Fans!

It’s time for another HUMP DAY WEDNESDAY!!

I know what you must be thinking….

 “Bey Rowshan where you been Man? We een hear from you since days was cone!”

 Well I’ve been right here. Well not here, but you know…. HERE!! And I’ve been doing some thinking and I wanted to share with you some things I learned that time when I Almost DEAD!

Now I know what you’re probably thinking, “Exaggerate much Rowshan?! It couldn’t have been that bad!”

But when I say “I Almost Dead”, I literally mean that “I Almost Died!”

You: “WHAT!! YOU ALMOST DIED? HOW?!!”

The truth is that how is not that important, but because I know you like TEA almost as much as I like to SIP IT, I will share mine with you. Now if you ask me what happened, I would recount it by saying that I was literally “KNOCKED INTO NEXT WEEK!”. I went to bed at home on Friday night and somehow I woke up in the hospital on Sunday afternoon with no recollection of how I got there. If you ask the nurse who was at my bed when I woke up, she would say, “I don’t know what happened. I just know that he was brought here in an ambulance.” (SOME NURSE!!) And if you ask the officer from the scene who visited me in the hospital, he would say that I was hit by a driver who did not stop and left me on the side of the road to DEAD! (WHY DID HE SAY “TO DEAD” LIKE THAT? ISN’T DEAD PRESENT TENSE?) Anyway, to make a LONG STORY SHORT, I was involved in a Hit & Run Accident, where I was HIT and the driver RAN!

Needless to say. it was an experience that changed my perspective on Life. After waking up and finally taking in what had actually happened to me, I asked the question everyone who survives such an incident asks themselves, “WHAT HAPPENED TO MY TOOTH?!” Ok. So maybe everyone doesn’t ask what happened to their tooth, but I couldn’t help but wonder, “Where did it go? And could it have been saved? I mean do emergency responders just make it a habit to go to scenes and leave body parts unaccounted for?”

The entire situation was very DISCONCERTING!

Me: “DISCONCERTING? Rowshan, How can something be DISCONCERTING if you didn’t go to a CONCERT?”

Also Me: “Rowshan, I don’t think that’s what DISCONCERTING means”

Me: “Oh. Ok. Can we finish our TEA?”

Also Me: “We were making TEA? I thought we were writing?”

The second question I asked, is probably the “ACTUAL” question everyone who survives such an incident asks themselves “WHY DID I SURVIVE?”. And, I’m sure we’ve all been here at some point. Whether we survived an accident or not. We’ve questioned our purpose. We’ve questioned what we should be doing with our Lives. We’ve wondered, “IS THERE MORE THAT I CAN OR SHOULD BE DOING?”. And the truth is, there is always MORE. Very few of us live up to the actual potential we were born with. In fact, if we lived up to it, it wouldn’t be called potential it would be called something else.

Despite never UNLOCKING the Mystery of my Tooth there were a few TAKEAWAYS I gathered from my accident that make up part of the TEA I would like to share with you! Hopefully, you got your cup while I was boiling the water via my ramble above.

My first takeaway might be a bit obvious, but I’ll share it with you anyway….

1.) Don’t Get HIT By A Car!: And I mean this both LITERALLY and FIGURATIVELY! FIRSTABLE, it’s not as fun as it looks!

You: “But Rowshan, being hit by a car doesn’t look fun at all!”

Me: “I know! And it’s not even that much fun! You could DEAD!”

You: “Rowshan, why do you keep saying DEAD like that?”

Me: “That’s what he said!”

In Life there are many VEHICLES that threaten to Knock us off course. They can Knock us into Tomorrow, Knock us into Next Week, Knock us into Next Year and if we’re not careful, they can Knock years away from our Lives! We’re happily on route to our Goal and an unforeseen emergency runs the intersection of Proper Planning and Chaos, T-BONING us and sending us careening off the road of Proper Planning and down the street of Chaos!

The truth is that no VEHICLE will HIT as hard as Life. It’s completely UNCHARTED, completely UNSCRIPTED, completely UNCENSORED and despite the fact that we write the stories of our own Lives it’s a story of contributors who know nothing of our Goals and in some cases care nothing about them.

2.) Nothing Matters Until It’s Everything!:

You: “Wait! What? What do you mean by that? How can Nothing be Everything? Nothing is Nothing right?”

Me: “No…. Nothing is Everything and Everything is actually Nothing! Everything matters to someone and Nothing matters to Everyone, because Nothing matters until it becomes our Everything! Get it?”

You: “No. No Rowshan I don’t. Talk English To Me!“

I think Lauren Hill said this best when she said, “Everything Is Everything!” What doesn’t matter at all to us, matters immensely to someone else and what doesn’t matter at all to someone else matters immensely to us, but there are many things that do not matter at all to anyone until it becomes Everything anyone has to lose. Even if that Everything is only one small thing.

You: “Ohhhhh…. I still don’t get it?!”

Ok…. Let me explain, every day we take it for granted that we wake up with all of our senses and with all of our faculties. We take it for granted that we will walk out of the door and that we will return home. And we take it for granted that our loved ones will do the same. In a way they mean Nothing to us until they become the very thing threatened to be taken away. And it is at that point that they become Everything!

Health, Sight, Hearing, Taste, even Chewing are all taken for granted until something changes and shows us just how significant they are. So when I say that Nothing matters until it’s Everything, I mean that what I learned is that Nothing is actually Everything simply because it needs Everything in order to exist!

You: “Ok. You lost me again!”

Me: “I know! I lost me too! But to put it simply EVERYTHING MATTERS!”

I realised that it’s not the big things we’ll miss, but the little things…. And when you think about it, it’s the little things that we will be missed for. In the MICRO they seem minute, but in the MACRO they are integral. If something happens to a loved one, we won’t miss them because they paid all of the bills. That’s part of the MACRO. But we will miss them because they always left the light on until we got home. That’s part of the MICRO. When they did it, it meant Nothing. But when it’s gone, you suddenly realise that it meant Everything. To spell it out some more, it means that they thought about you in a way that was threefold. They saw you as a part of their Past, because they remembered you. They saw you as a part of their Present because they acted on that memory. They saw you as a part of their Future because they prepared for your return. The simple act of leaving the light on may have meant Nothing in that MICRO moment, but in the MACRO when you realise that they will never be here to do it again, it means Everything!

3.) Life Goes On!: I knew this before, but I understand it now! Life literally Goes On! Ok, so maybe it ALMOST didn’t for me, but when I woke up, what felt like 2 maybe 3 hours, was almost 36 hours. And when I was given my phone, there were only 3 people who questioned my whereabouts, but all of my other groups Carried On their normal conversations. During the time I spent in the Hospital, the world Carried On outside. And during the weeks that I was out of office, work Carried On without me. Life Carried On so well in fact, that by the end of that month, the entire BAHAMAS was facing “A New Day!” We had changed political parties and the world couldn’t have been any wiser to what happened…. I mean, I almost DEAD for goodness sake!!

The truth is that absolutely NO ONE, IMPACTs the world in such a way that Life literally stops at their passing. For those who are Alive, Life simply Goes On! The world continues to Turn! Time continues to Tick! Days continue to be Days and nights continue to be Nights. For our loved ones who are Alive, things may change, they may even slow down, but in time, they continue.

So if the world doesn’t stop for you, why should you stop for the world?

You: “Mr. Jones, make it make sense please!” *in my SADANAE voice*

Me: “What I mean IIIIIISSSSS…. Life around us doesn’t stop simply because Life within us does.”

You: “Lost again Rowshan!! Listen to your *INNER voice*!!”

Me: “What I mean is, Life within us doesn’t only stop when we take our last breath…. For some, Life stops long before that. But, we shouldn’t allow difficulties or setbacks to hold us back and put our Life on pause.”

In Life we are either heading for a Crisis, going through a Crisis or coming out of a Crisis. However, when we face a Crisis, we shouldn’t allow it to stop us. We shouldn’t allow DOUBT or FEAR of Failure or even being HIT by a car to stop us from allowing our Life to Go On!

4.) Don’t Let The Damage You See On The Outside Determine How You Feel On The Inside!: I think this may have been the most vital lesson I learned during the whole experience. As you can imagine, when you get hit by a car and you almost DEAD, you don’t walk away without a scratch.

You: “Rowshan, can you stop saying “DEAD” like that? It’s not proper grammatical use of the word….Tanks!!”

Me: “I know it’s not, but it sounds funny and it’s impactful!”

Anyway, back to the TEA! The lesson here was simple, but grand! Many times we allow what we see on the outside to determine our choices and to IMPACT how we feel on the inside. In truth, we probably don’t even realise that we are doing it, but we do it all the time. FEAR and DOUBT creep in because things don’t seem to be going our way. We didn’t get the referrals we wanted at work so we give up. We don’t get the position as fast as we wanted to, so we become complacent. Life doesn’t look the way we thought it would at 25 so we become discouraged. We allow all of these external factors to limit what we believe is possible for our Lives. But to sound completely “Cliché”, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to what happens.”

To put it another way, our Lives are 10% what happens to us and 90% how we think about what happened. For some reason I had never felt so much FINALITY in Life as I did after my accident. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake it. Every time I looked in the mirror or moved too much, the damage I felt and saw on the Outside, impacted what I felt on the Inside. However, it was coming to terms with this lesson that allowed me to truly move beyond the feeling of FINALITY that was so difficult to shake in the beginning.

5.) Live is a Verb, DEAD is a Noun: Ok, so DEAD is probably an Adjective, but Noun had less syllables. And this was perhaps the best lesson I learned…. Live!

Living is an ACTION! It’s something we do. It involves Planning. It involves Learning. It involves Growing. It involves Excelling, Overcoming FEAR and moving past DOUBT. It involves all of the things we find difficult, but in the end allow us to Live a Life that won’t be described as DEAD! So is your Life a Verb or is it a Noun?

If your life is currently a Noun, I encourage you to take ACTION! What Goals have you been putting off? What Dream have you stopped chasing? What watered down version of Life have you settled for?

If you are not doing it, LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE now!!

Until Next Time…. Let’s STAY ENGAGED!