Brain is still a little scrambled today, although there was noticeable improvement over the course of the day, and it became easier to think and talk. I still have a certain distance and lack of focus, and I have to remind myself more often to concentrate on what I'm doing (the majority of my spiritual practice at this point involves being completely immersed in activities like opening jars and making toast--I firmly believe you can raise the making of toast to the level of a Japanese tea ceremony, and that it's very important to try). No big deal, I'm tired and shaken up, so my mind is wandering.
I was wondering why this accident has rattled my body so much more than my previous accidents, and Ann at work suggested that there was quite a shock in going from being stopped at a light to crashing into two separate cars without warning. In my previous two accidents, I was moving and had both a lot of time to react, and a lot of options. When I spun across the highway, it was because I'd seen that I was about to ram a sander truck at a relative speed of 30mph or so, and I swerved and that started the spin; when I hit the old guy in the Cadillac, I saw him cut me off and had plenty of time to realize I was going to hit him as I pumped the brakes and hydroplaned. This time, even if I had realized sooner what was happening, I couldn't have done anything at all.
Hobbit weddings. 'Nuff said.
Best one: people sue the government to stop the war.
I'm looking forward to the answers about what's going on with me. Where does this anger and hurt come from? Did something awful happen when I was little and I just chose to forget about it? I have a great power to dissociate, and that was my preferred way of dealing with the world until less than a year ago, so maybe while the Bad Thing[tm] was happening I just...checked out. Took my mind elsewhere. And then never entirely came back. I have absolutely zero memory of such a thing, but here's the Shadow, and that's real enough.
Then, too, it could just be dumb luck, an unfortunate interaction of me and the rest of the world. I'm different, by nature: even in a tribe of oddballs, I stick out (the greatest compliment I ever received was from a friend who, when I asked why she needed to dye her hair to maintain her self-expression while working in the Financial District, said, "Chris, you can sit there in jeans and a flannel shirt and somehow people know you're different. Most of us aren't like that."). So maybe there's just been all these feedback cycles and I just didn't make the childhood->adulthood transition as gracefully as we all might have liked, and this is all a big knot of crap that only started when I was 9.
They're both equally likely. Everything will shake out in the end.
More importantly, during our team meeting today, there were all these birds--sparrows or some kind of chickadee--hanging around in the pine tree outside the window, and I spent ten or fifteen minutes during a discussion that didn't apply to me, watching this one bird standing on this one branch, apparently preening and resting or something. They all seemed very happy, being a part of an ecosystem. The process that developed these perfect little creatures that fly around and live off pine cone seeds is the same process that developed us, who proceeded to create buildings, with windows so we can see our brothers and sisters outside.