Seven Minutes on the Pavement

One year ago today, I found myself lying on dark and very cold pavement, face to face with a man who had just been struck by a pickup truck, and was now yelling at the truck driver that his neck was broken.

I don’t believe in too many binaries in this life, but here’s one: we are either in a space of fear or a space of love. I don’t mean necessarily capital-L Love, as in, in love.  I mean that if we can act from something other than fear, then we find the guidance of humanity and spirit and connection.

Less than 2 minutes earlier, when I managed to swerve my own car to avoid hitting this man, who was parked in the middle of a dark street in his wheelchair, I was solidly in fear.  He looked dirty and disheveled, he was shaking his fists and yelling at me as I drove past him. He scared me. And before I could get my car to the side of the road and circle back to figure out how to get him out of the middle of the street, he got hit. I heard the sound of the impact, the truck hitting a body, the pieces of his broken wheelchair skittering across the pavement.

What compelled me, in the middle of Covid and in the middle of winter, to lie down in the street with a man I would have taken great care to stay away from not 90 seconds earlier? What compelled me on this night to be something more than a bystander or simply the person who dialed 911? But something did compel me, and I spent seven minutes connected with Eugene while we waited for the ambulance to come. I laid down next to him, held his eyes, put my hand on his arm, talked to him. I offered him my calm and saw him: a man deeply vulnerable, terrified about his body and independence, in pain and indignation. A man not accustomed to being seen.  Or even looked at.

It was seven minutes of oddly breathtaking intimacy, when nothing mattered except that we were two humans, me with comfort to offer, and him both desperately in need of comfort and, it turned out, with a different gift altogether for me.

Eugene showed me seven minutes of magnificence: his and mine.  He calmed, he let me comfort him. He trusted me to spend this time with him. He showed me who lived inside the ranting, unkempt man who shook his fist at me as I drove by. And I learned the power of what’s possible when I shed everything except connecting with and holding another human with my eyes. I learned the power and potency and sheer fucking humanity that happens when we drop all the fear.

Eugene cracked me open.

I wish I could tell you that I understood something – or anything – about the gift of Eugene on this night last year. Nope. I think I trembled and took about three weeks to settle down.

But as I reflect back one year later, I understand something new: I saw an incredible light in this tragic and terrible event, the way that tragic and terrible events can strip us down to some essence of what makes us human and find the space of only-love. And then the universe dropped me blindfolded into some dark woods and said: now it’s time for you to learn your way back to your love and humanity.

It took me months and months to find my way through those dark woods. As we queue up for another Thanksgiving holiday, I can say: I’m grateful to be spending more time in love than fear these days. I am grateful for my life and what I have to offer – and for what I am learning to receive.

I am grateful to know that I have this choice most hours and certainly every day: is it going to be love, Margaret, or is it going to be fear? Where do you want to live?

Where do YOU want to live? Want some help finding love over fear? Let’s talk.