Yesterday, I was nearly run over by a car. I was walking down to REI, crossing at a busy intersection only a couple blocks from the store. I was in the crosswalk. I had the light. I was not talking on my phone or listening to music or doing anything other than crossing the street.
That’s when it happened. A massive SUV raced into the intersection and started to turn left, directly toward where I was walking. My first thought was that the driver must certainly see me. Then I thought that the driver certainly does not see me. And finally I thought only of the looming chrome grill and the bumper’s deadly gray glare.
I sprinted forward just in time, letting loose a string of expletives that rushed forth like, well, like someone running from of an oncoming car.
The driver saw me just as I had leapt out of the way. She hit the brakes and stared at me with a look of horror that directly reflected what I felt inside. She did not move or speak, though clearly, judging by her troubled gaze, there was something she wanted to say.
I walked away.
That was the third time in the past month I was almost run down. I’m not talking about the usual close encounters you get when you mix pedestrians and cars. I’m talking about a second or two having made the difference between being here to write this post or being splattered in the street along with the rest of the road kill. And in all three cases, I was in a designated crosswalk and had the right-of-way. In all three cases, the drivers sat with looks of terror on their faces, once they realized they had almost nailed me. In all three cases, I escaped only because I happened to be paying more attention than the people in their cars.
It would be nice to come up with a convenient explanation for this string of mishaps, but none has been forthcoming. In only one case was the driver talking on a cell phone. Not the woman yesterday, but the woman who almost splattered me in Beaverton. And the other driver, a young guy pulling out of a nearby Honda dealer, didn’t look in my direction until I pounded on his car. The woman yesterday looked. She just never saw me.
Having this happen a third time in such close proximity to the other two incidents has me wondering what might be going on. One possibility, of course, is that the three near misses were merely coincidental, several rolls of the dice that resulted in unrelated events, if you believe in that sort of possibility.
Another explanation is that someone was—and perhaps still is—out to get me. If not a specific person, then perhaps a greater power. The universe is a trickster, after all, and as most of us realize, no one gets out of here alive.
There is yet a third possibility. We’re all a lot more distracted than ever before. Our ability to concentrate has been undermined by cultural forces that are curtailing our capacity to perform all but the most rudimentary of tasks with a clear head. Satellite TV and social networking and mobile phones and the Internet have pointed our brains into so many directions that we’ve become incapable of looking in any one of them for any length of time.
I like this theory. It puts everything into a neat little perspective. And it makes me feel less paranoid than the belief that a vindictive person—or worse, a vindictive god—is trying to run me down.
Yet pinning our evolutionary fates on technology is no easy task, although people have been trying to do so since Gutenberg started peddling his Bibles. In recent years, we’ve seen a flurry of publications suggesting that the Internet is changing the way we read and think.
Take Nicholas Carr. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he makes the case that, because of the Internet, many people no longer read at the same depth they once did. They no longer have the capacity to do so, he believes, which causes him no small level of concern. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our minds.”
Carr even suggests that deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he writes, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
But such arguments, whether or not true, don’t necessarily explain why people are trying to run me down. In fact, one could posit that the Internet—and the multitude of devices it now supports—keeps our focus shifting at such rapid speeds that we’re becoming more equipped to react quickly to unforeseen events. Our brains may be reverting to a pre-literary age, a time when we had to maintain constant vigilance for encroaching threats, whether real or otherwise. The Internet might represent an evolutionary step backwards that is perhaps making us more aware of our surroundings, rather than less.
I realize I’m reaching here, especially in light of recent studies that challenge our assumptions about multi-tasking, which the Internet has helped to define, if not outright heralded. And the fact is, I can’t say with any certainty whether this theory or any others might even be close to the truth. I best leave such matters to those with far more expertise than what I have.
What I wonder, however, is whether we should also be looking at the social factors that have led us to embrace the Internet and electronic gadgetry with such vehemence. You walk into a coffee shop and most of the patrons are staring at laptops or tablets or smartphones. You walk down the street, past parents with strollers and people with dogs and pedestrians rushing hither and yon, and you find a hefty percentage calling or texting or plugging into their devices.
When the iPhone 5 went on sale the other day, four of the top 10 most viewed stories on The New York Times website were related to the new device. It’s as though we can’t embrace this electronic wizardry fast enough. Perhaps it’s letting us do what we’ve wanted to do all along—protect ourselves within invisible walls that grow higher and wider and more substantial with each new product that comes on the market.
Even so, whether my recent string of near misses has anything to do with a cultural trend, I cannot say. But we do seem less capable of focusing on our day-to-day tasks more than ever before. I buy groceries from stores with clerks who never acknowledge my presence. They scan my food absently as they talk to other employees or stare into space. I step out of the way of people rushing down sidewalks, unaware I’m there as they send and receive their daily allotment of texts. I watch bicyclists ride past me while talking on their cell phones, ignoring stop signs and traffic and people crossing the streets. I rush out of the way of moving vehicles because the drivers never notice I’m walking in the places they’re about to occupy.
Something is going on. We seem so distracted by everything that’s not in front of us that we’re no longer capable of responding to what’s actually there. We live in every place but this one. We experience every moment but this one.
Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Touching Peace, says that our true home is in this moment. “To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.”
I like that. In fact, as soon as I get a chance, I plan to google “living in the moment,” right after I check my email and send a few texts and catch up on Facebook and return several phone calls. I only hope that Google doesn’t lead me on a wild google chase and I end up visiting a bunch of home decorating sites and insurance company sites and car dealer sites. But if I do come up with anything useful about living in the moment, I’ll be sure to send out a tweet or two so the rest of you can get a glimpse of all that wisdom.