When the Unexpected Happens pt 2/2

(If you prefer to watch, check out my video on YoutTube!

If you haven’t read part 1, you can do so here. It gives you more context for what I talk about below.

On August 28, 2020, my heart was broken… and my left shoulder blade, too.

A 1500 Ram Ford truck hit me with its mirror right outside of Indianapolis as I rode my bike on the shoulder of a two lane road 1.5 months into a cross country (and back) tour – a trip I expected to fill the next two years of my life. This sent me on a downward spiral for about 6 months and I didn’t physically fully recover until after about 12 months.

In the end, though, I learned a lot.

Lesson 1:

I ended part one of this blog on a note of gratitude because we really do have so much to be grateful for. So much has to go right for you to even get out of bed in the morning. Not only do you have to be in generally good health, but a number of people and materials had to be available along the way to make just that one moment possible. Competent people had to be present to run the factories that made the mattress, the sheets, the pillow, the alarm clock, your PJs, your house! There had to be people working at the electrical plant to power those factories. There had to be enough resources each step of the way. And so on. Now apply that to literally every other moment in your life.

Lesson 2:

Don’t force things. Be receptive to those around you and your surroundings. It’s good to be determined, but not to the point of hard headedness. In planning the bike trip, it didn’t matter to me that it would start in the midst of the pandemic or that there were a bunch of riots happening throughout the nation and that the elections were about to happen. I had a goal and a date in mind and that was how it was going to be. But, of course, the Universe found a way to put a stop to it because it wasn’t meant to be, at least not yet.

Lesson 3:

I had to learn how to accept help from others, which was evident even before the accident. Almost since the start of the tour, messages kept entering my life encouraging me to stop trying to be so self-reliant and independent from others. Unwittingly, I had ignored these messages or even actively denied them, and so it wasn’t until I was put in a position where I had to accept others’ help that I realized that I still had to make strides to further assimilate this as a practice in my life. I literally had to be physically unable to do things for myself in order to allow myself to receive and to see that doing so was not a burden for others. Out of this experience came an affirmation that I’ve written and keep at my bedside for whenever I need a reminder that: “Today I will accept the help of others, for it makes me stronger, not weaker.”

Lesson 4:

This experience also showed me, yet again, the power that honoring our emotions has. There’s a general misconception that we can wish away all forms of negativity by grasping onto positivity for dear life. But doing so only hides the negativity under a layer of lies, making the negativity persevere longer and making it harder to eventually access and release than it would have been if dealt with right away. Buddhist wisdom advises that we shouldn’t react to our emotions, but rather respond to them. Perhaps that’s what people think they’re doing when they push away ‘negative’ emotions, but the simple truth is that pushing an emotion away is still reacting to it. The only way to respond to it is to let it wash over you and transmit to you the message(s) it holds. Then and only then can it be released. I’ll probably go into this more in depth in another blog, but letting go is not an active process. It is a natural consequence to Surrendering to what is, and that includes your emotions. Everything else, whether you realize it or not, is a form of grasping, reacting, denying, suppressing, and/or repressing. Don’t focus on positivity. It will come. Instead, let yourself feel what you’re feeling. Be there for yourself. Hold space for yourself. Love yourself. Because what’s more loving, more positive than staying by your side even when you’re angry, upset, jealous, or ashamed?

Lesson 5:

Immediately following the accident, I noticed that my spirituality had taken a hit. Not only because I wasn’t able to keep up with my habits of yoga and meditation for a few months, but also because of a message transmitted to me through my aunt that I had veered off my path. I kept thinking to myself:

If there’s a path that we’re meant to follow, then how could they (the angels, God, the Universe) have let me stray off of it so much that the only way to get me back on track was through a car accident?

Why were there no signs beforehand to gently alert me of my diversion? And if there is a path we’re meant to follow, then why let me stray off it at all?

And most importantly: How could something that felt so right have been so wrong?

But the truth is that there were signs. I just hadn’t heeded them. People we ran into kept giving us ominous warnings of the road ahead. And they weren’t just the normal messages of “two females on the road, alone? Be careful.” Those warnings are to be expected. No. These were different. Each person prefaced their warning with a claim that it was being channeled from above or that, for one reason or another, they felt pulled to tell us to be careful in that moment. And each time they warned us of imminent danger, not just the generic things people say. Not only that, but just 1-2 weeks before the accident, I saw a goldfinch attempt to flit from my side of the road to the other. Soon after its take off, though, a truck (I don’t know what kind, but something tells me it may have been a 1500 Ram) clipped it and it fell to the side of the road. I immediately parked next to it and inspected it to see if it was still alive and if there was anything we could do to help it. When I did, I noticed that it was bleeding from its left wing. I didn’t know what to do other than to try to comfort it, so I poured some water into my cupped hands and allowed it to drink and then laid it as far from the road as possible in hopes that other birds would eventually come to its aid. Being a witness to this accident dampened my mood the rest of the day, but I ultimately accepted that things like this happen all the time and there unfortunately wasn’t much I could do to stop it.

Photo provided by Mark Olsen on Unsplash

Yet the memory of the accident never fully left me. And actually, only while writing this blog did I think to look up if there was any symbolism behind goldfinches. That’s when I found out that dreaming or seeing a bleeding goldfinch signifies that you or someone close to you has ignored a possible source of danger in their life and will soon be in an accident resulting in a critical health condition for months to come (I’m not making this up). Seeing or dreaming of a dead or dying goldfinch is also an omen that foreshadows failure and disappointment, though normally goldfinches remind us to not lose hope when things seem daunting and to wait for things to blow over before you start working on them again (as I should have done when planning the trip). They’re also a reminder to appreciate the little things in life because nothing, including health, is ever guaranteed.