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| Jared Thomas Class of 2019 |
The world looks a little different from the inside of a spinning metal cage.
It smells like thick, acrid smoke and floods your lungs with a chorus of clashing, crunching metal pivots held together by hope-against-hope. It grips your sweat stained palms with worn away leather tassels and it jams your wobbling knees against thin sheets of quivering plastic. Blue skies up above are painted in startling mosaics of shattered glass and the wind whistles a deadly tune in the space between where your door used to be and where you most certainly are.
I was in a car accident. This is how it changed me.
Every single day, we throw our covers to the side with a light flick of the wrist. We place our feet on the ground, one delicate foot in front of the other and we breath in and out, in and out, entirely unaware of the simple miracle that it is to exhale.We flip on a tiny switch in a blistering plastic tub and a blast of warm water wipes away the dirt and grime you never quite remember collecting and you close your eyes.You find solace in the sensations of the darkness and you barely even register your muscles pressing your skin outward as the world falls into place without you even having to bend a single finger.
Life is easy. We forget that.
And you’ll keep forgetting it until something so violent, so brash and brutal and wild happens to you that it shocks you into a different state of being. We live in our lulls, we don’t try to escape them. We live in the pauses, we don’t strive to hit play. In this day and age, in this time and place, it’s entirely positive to float through life without ever living, to drift through the swirls and eddies and to just…be without being.
That’s wrong. I’m not going to mince words, I’m not going to flowery bout it, I’m going to tell you flat out, no holds barred, that living like that is wrong.
There is so much of this wonderful place we call Earth to experience, so many abandoned places to trudge through, so many quiet seconds to spend with the ones you love, so many hearts to be broken and so many sunrises to see. Every single second you spend denying this fact is a day you spend not living the life you could.
We tend to fall into a pattern of belief, of subservience to this idea that things have to be a certain way because they have to be a certain way, that things are this way because they are that way, that we are these people because these people are us.
That’s not true. Never throughout history has someone’s race been ran for them.
Now, normally, it takes a near death experience to reach this kind of realization, but let me save you all the trouble in the world and tell you that your days are numbered, so start counting.
Jared Thomas, of Cynthiana, Ky., is a sophomore McConnell Scholar studying political science, economics, and French.