Vivid Normalcy

You’re driving down the freeway, doing 70 but relaxed and aware of the other cars around you. Your mind wanders as it does on a long drive, but you bring it back regularly to the road and the traffic. You and the other drivers may all be headed in the same direction and staying mostly in your lanes, but people can get distracted, and when they do, things happen.

And then something does happen. The car just to your left starts changing lanes and he’s way too close. You must be in his blind spot, and now he’s almost scraping your left fender. You slow down to let him in, but the car behind is coming up on you fast and so – checking your side mirror and seeing it’s clear – you pull quickly to the right, letting the first driver in while the second one eases past. That was close. As your heart slows down, you’re grateful you were tuned in at that moment.

A couple miles later traffic has stopped dead. After sitting for twenty minutes, you actually get out of your car and stand on the freeway wondering what happened – though you know. Word filters to you: accident. Big one. Five or six cars. Ambulances and tow trucks and fire engines. Time passes and people complain to one another. Eventually everyone is getting back in their cars and now you’re driving again, glad to be doing even 10 MPH. You creep past the wreckage and it’s something all right, all that bent metal and broken glass. You hope all the drivers and passengers lived, but it would be easy to imagine they didn’t.

As a writer, you know everyone who saw the crash, and everyone who was stuck on the freeway with you, who was annoyed with the delay, who had some place to be to which they would be late, and everyone who drove past the pile of crumpled cars and shuddered a little, glad theirs wasn’t in that mash, will have a story to tell. It won’t be much of a story, frankly, being mostly irritation followed by mild horror and then back to normal. Still, it’s not every day you’re standing on the freeway. That’s something.

Much harder to tell the story of not crashing. It goes unnoticed. Did anyone even see you avoid that car earlier? It would be easy to forget if they did. Spectacular failure is so much more memorable than success, so much easier to see, to remember, to describe. But who wants it? How, you begin to wonder, can you describe success, which usually just look like people getting where they’re going, as powerfully as failure? You’re not sure if you can, but you know it’s worth a try. It’s worth capturing the beauty of what we all want as vividly as the horror of what we don’t. Normalcy is interesting too, in the same way taking a deep breath soothes you and reminds you you’re safe and still driving.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com