By Michael
Good morning, everybody. I’m going to be sharing something very personal today that impacts some stuff that we’ve been studying in the book club and some overall Buddhist doctrine and philosophy.
A little bit of a background: about a year and a half ago, I had a very near-fatal bike crash. I had CPR given on-site. It was very bad. Part and parcel of this is I had a traumatic brain injury and was bleeding in two different parts of my brain (yes, I was wearing a helmet) in addition to a laundry list of other injuries. Yesterday, I rode the same route with the same people. A 22 mile out and back route from Lexington Reservoir to the summit. I was going back to the place that almost killed me. The accident was a solo crash, and for a year and a half, I have replayed it, wondering, “What did I do wrong? How could I have done better?” It’s a loop that plays up to the point where the events leading up to the crash are ingrained into my memory. The accident itself is a blank spot (common with trauma) but I re-rode that descent in my mind more times that I can count.
When I decided to revisit this place, I wanted to leave a commemoration. I decided to place a little Jizo at the site to keep an eye over the spot where the accident happened. Apparently, someone else had also had a bad bicycle crash at that same place before mine.
I was thinking this would be a catharsis. This was going to be it. I would get there, place the statue, and my obsession was going to be done.
I rode back to the spot with the person who had performed the resuscitation on me on the way up (easier to stop on the way up, than on a swift descent). After I placed the Jizo, sat for a bit, and gave a bow, I had a realization. The accident, as traumatic as it was for me, looking back had an incredibly positive benefit. For those of you that knew me, I have lost over 85 pounds as part of my recovery. I’m in far better health than I was before this happened. I was reminded of that parable about the farmer who had a whole series of disasters that turned out to be good things in the end. His son breaks his leg and can’t help till the fields, but then the army calls up all the young men, and his son is safe. Events can often only be accurately viewed in hindsight.
I thought that was it time to move on – and I continued to ride.
But the route held a surprise and deeper lesson in store. If you’ve ever done a bicycle ride that involves a lot of climbing, you know your views are very different on the way up and back down. I could have sworn I could have told you exactly where the accident happened, and what places were near it, and what was far away. The site was miles away from a safety shop – and this nice farm was right before the site. I’d ridden it again dozens of times in my thoughts.
As I was coming back down, something hit me on the whole descent: my entire memory of the route was wrong! Things were appearing in the wrong order! The farm was miles away from the site, and the safety stop was the last landmark before the accident site. My mind was a blur. It would be as if you turned right to go home every day and suddenly realized the correct way was to turn left. I had been so profoundly wrong about this for a year and a half and had lived deep inside this thing. It was as if reality as I knew it was “wrong”, and I was seeing it correctly for the first time – it was a shocking clarity.
It was amazing and made the descent seem more “real” to me. As I passed the accident site and bowed my head to Jizo (I was in new territory now, having never “ridden” this part of the downhill route) I had a thought.
It was a delusion. My understanding of the descent, for a year and a half, was entirely wrong. My brain, because of that trauma, wrote it in the wrong order in my mind. The pieces were correct but jumbled up.
I was thinking about this and about how Buddhist doctrine often tells us that how we perceive the world is an illusion—that how we see things isn’t necessarily the true nature of reality. Now, this is cheating (I’m not going to pretend to be even close to enlightened, because this is the result of head trauma and some knocked loose wiring in the noggin) but in that second of clarity, I can understand what it must be like to have that kind of epiphany. Honestly it was a sort of high that is hard to explain.
There was just that little bit of a glimpse of, “Okay, yeah, maybe there is something to say about how the world that exists in our heads isn’t the real world.” And that was truly my moment of catharsis. After those two things happened, my relationship with this accident is entirely different than what it was before.
I wanted to end by saying thank you to everyone. Sitting here in the zendo with all of you has been so important to my recovery over the last year and a half.
Hakone Zendo 