It’s late afternoon on the Friday before Labor Day weekend. The office is quietening down with that particular hush that reminds you that this is not an ordinary weekend. This is a weekend when people leave town, fire up grills, gather with friends and family, and embrace the dwindling days of summer.
The road construction crew outside my second-story office window catches my eye. They are finishing up a waterline project. There’s a large dump truck filled with asphalt, orange-vested workers with rakes and shovels, and a road roller. The road roller operator skillfully tamps down the asphalt into a clean and smooth surface.
I remember a road roller that could have tragically bent my life in a far different direction. It was the summer of 1986, and I had recently graduated law school. I was studying for the Bar exam, a process that was complicated by the arrival earlier that year of our adorable, but complicated and colicky, first-born son. Eric was six months old. He was not a disciplined or consistent napper, and I was inexperienced in regulating his sleep schedule.
On that summer day, when he should have been tucked into his little crib in the nursery for a morning nap, I was placating him on the couch while I was trying to study. I heard a crash that sounded like a freight train exploding into our house. Without thinking, I grabbed Eric and ran outside, where I was horrified to see that a road roller from a road construction project had crashed into our house, coming through a large picture window and into the nursery. The operator had bailed out shortly before smashing into our house, and the road roller had hit Eric’s crib dead-on, demolishing it.
I was devastated and traumatized by what could have happened. The potential loss of a child is too wrenching to contemplate by itself but knowing that the hand of fate is often capricious adds to the terror. Over time, I tucked that near-miss into the recesses of my subconscious, and life returned to normal. But I understand that life is a delicate mixture of paths chosen and tenuous fortuity, which combine for a journey filled to the brim with unexpected joy and beauty as well as uncertainty and happenstance.
We are vulnerable to events we can’t control but we can mitigate their impacts by conscious decisions about healthy lifestyle, emotional engagement, and a commitment to living in the present. I’m grateful for my conscious decision years ago to exercise every day but there was an element of fortuity in it as well. Why did I decide on March 5, 2010 to see if I could exercise every single day? I don’t remember. It was probably just an early-morning, caffeine-infused crazy idea that stuck.
I pound an awful lot of pavement these days on asphalt carefully and thoroughly flattened by road rollers, most of which have never taken an unfettered foray on their own.