As a couple of you who are my super secret FB friends know, I walked out to my car this morning to find that one of my tires had gone flat.
Which is an unfortunate occurrence and definitely not something that I was looking forward to having happen. However, thinking about it it's actually a pretty good thing that I found my tire flat this morning.
Last night I had my class which goes until 8 pm. So I was driving home on I75 which, at least around here, is not very well lit. It goes over several bridges (which freak me out a bit anyway, I have a morbid fear of crashing on a bridge and my car being sent into the water) and it's a 20-30 minute drive from the college campus to my house.
I was about 5 minutes from my exit when I heard something hit my car on the right side. Sort of a flapping-tapping sound, like someone running something over the side panel or on the undercarriage. I slowed down and looked, trying to see if there was anything caught on my mirror or anything like that. I didn't see anything and the car didn't start behaving oddly. I've blown a tire while driving before, though not at highway speeds, and I know what it feels like. I made it all the way home, parked and went about my night.
My guess is that whatever I hit last night (there's sometimes debris on the highway which is easy to avoid in the day but harder at night though I'm a good driver if I do say so myself) punctured my tire. And I feel very lucky that it was a slow leak (obviously) and not a blow out because at 70-80 mph I'm certain I would have crashed.
And of course thinking about how lucky I was that my tire went flat when and how it did, it makes me think, 'Well is it really *luck*, just random draw of the universe, or is it that I wasn't meant to have an accident like that?' Not that I think angels were keeping my tire inflated or anything, but that...that there is a plan, like an outline and certain things are meant to happen in your life. And certain things are not meant to happen. And so they do or they don't, because that's the plan.
Saying it like that makes it sound like I don't think there's free will, which is not the case. We clearly have free will. It's one of the factors that makes us human. But maybe, like I said, there's a map and there are many ways that you can go but there are certain fixed points within each life that are meant to happen.
/witterings
Interesting thoughts, and I'm really really happy you didn't have any problems driving home last night aside from the thing you heard. I like to think God keeps us safe (or alive anyway) until it's our time to go. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm really happy I didn't have any problems on the road too!
DeleteI think whatever I hit is what punctured my tire. They didn't find whatever it was in the tire but they found the hole and could patch it up good as new. :)
I think people often underestimate/don't understand the theory behind probability. Just because something only happens one in a million, doesn't mean it won't happen - in a country the size of the US it'll happen 300 times! And in a world of 6 billion people it'll happen 6000 times! Unlikely isn't the same as impossible, and it has to happen to someone :)
ReplyDeleteI'm happy you are safe :)
I think it's less that they don't understand and more that we want to believe that there's a reason behind it happening to *us* and not the other 5 billion plus people on the planet. Probability says it has to happen to someone, somewhere, but why does it happen to the person that it happens to?
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