Nothing Happened

My short two-mile commute was mildly harrowing this morning (wait a minute: is there such a thing as ‘mildly’ harrowing?).  Something along the lines of a Planes, Trains and Automobiles commute: Dogs, Cars and Cyclists. 

Riding down a neighborhood street a small dog came after me.  The dog itself wasn’t dangerous, but traffic was on the street, and unanticipated evasive maneuvers can be tricky.  The bigger highlight was that this dog has come after me before.  Its owners walk the dog without holding onto the leash even though they’ve seen it chase bicycles.  I lost my serenity:

“This is the second time your dog has come after me.  Why is it not being held?” I demanded to know.  The elderly male of the couple walked into the street and took up the leash and pulled the dog back.  “Are you hurt?” he inquired, with the obvious answer being ‘no.’  The dog had pulled up beside me but had not tried to bite, the implication was that I had nothing to complain about.  My noisy counter-points did not carry the day.

A few minutes later, approaching a right turn controlled by a traffic light, a car zipped ahead of me with about thirty feet to go to the light, crowded over to the right, cut off the bike lane, trying to beat me through the intersection.  Traffic held the driver up, though, and I was able to reestablish position and proceed with my own right turn safely. 

And at my final light, at which right-turning traffic can continue on a green arrow while through-traffic is stopped, a cyclist turning right flew past me with inches to spare, just as the through-light was turning green and I was pushing off to go straight.

In every case I imagined the offending party saying the same thing the dog owner did: Are you hurt?  Did anything happen? 

Well no, nothing happened.  All parties to these encounters went on their way essentially unchanged.  Yet for each encounter, only fragile inches separated us from a ruined morning, from injury, from having much bigger problems to worry about.   

We’re a society that waits for something bad to happen before we take any action.  This is true from personal habits to national policy.  Prevention is not high on our list of priorities.  We’re not a people who ask ‘what if’ that often.  We dodge bullets and behave as if that is our birthright.

But when those bullets hit we yell, we accuse, we demand punishment of the guilty and compensation for the victims.  Only rarely do we put together our blithe indifference and our blind outrage.  We don’t see that often the reason things happen is because we assume that they won’t.  We ignore the fact that the usual difference between something and nothing happening is infinitesimally small, and that we can never know which situations will end up as ‘something’ and which ones as ‘nothing.’  When nothing happens we act as if we knew it all along.

But things did happen this morning.  Dangerous forces in the world moved dangerously closer to one another.  Every one of the people involved in all three encounters, I would say, had their mornings altered, their serenity diminished.  Only at our peril do we only allow these moments to pass unnoticed.  Only at our peril do we fail to allow the question ‘what if’ to govern our actions in trafficked space.