Brooke Writes Books... and Other Musings...

Woke up this morning the same way I do every weekday morning with the clock radio coming on to a soft-jazz station. No jolting outta bed for this kid. The sucker comes on at 5AM which I figure is cruelty enough. I stumbled outta bed to turn the heat on, turn the coffee pot on, turn my computer on and made a bee-line back to bed to catch the morning traffic report. Another ritual…

Today instead of hearing about the usual slow spots, the nice sounding traffic reporter announced a Sig-Alert. A possible fatality…which I have learned means a definite fatality. A chill stole over me… I always hate this type of news.

As the morning progressed, this particular accident turned out to be even more poignantly gruesome. A semi-truck had stalled in the slow lane, and a minivan had plowed into the back of it. Never even had the chance to brake. A husband and wife in their sixties with their twenty-year-old grandson were on their way to the airport. All three died.

A day they had probably all been looking forward to never really got started for them. They never even got to see the sun rise.

It definitely brings home the fact that life is so precarious. Anything can happen in an instant…faster than one can snap their fingers. It also reminds us that we can’t wait to put off those goals and plans that we keep thinking we’ll do tomorrow. And it definitely means there is no time to spare expending energy on trivialities that really don’t really matter in the total scheme of things.

Maybe sometimes we need incidents like this to spur us on, to remind us of what is really important. I know I certainly didn’t mind being at work one bit today. While I may have the same attitude tomorrow, I will probably become complacent again in the next few days or weeks…until another jarring jolt of reality hits me…