A YEAR AFTER THE CRASH

One year ago this week, I could have died.

That is where my mind has been for the last few days.

I will never know exactly how it happened. My front tire must have slipped out from under me on a small stick or a loose stone as I came down the hillside on a smooth Arkansas dirt path. I flew over the bars and into total chaos. My body hit the ground hard and if I had landed a few inches differently on either side, I don’t believe I would be writing this today.

I remember it the way you remember a dream. Time frozen, blurry at the edges, surreal. I was on the ground and blood was pouring out of me. My T8 vertebra was broken. My nose shattered in two places. Fractures, lacerations, bruises across my body. The skin on my face was torn loose and some of it was gone. Twenty-nine stitches and nine hours later, they released me from the ER to lie in my bed for weeks.

The days after the crash were full of light and dark. The months after slowly let my body heal.

I still find the evidence on me. My nose has an odd flattened spot I feel when I wash my face. My neck is stiff in the mornings. The skin above my lip is tender and scarred. My mind is different too — it carries a strange grief I find hard to explain, a sadness tangled up with gratitude.

As I write this, I feel tears coming that I will hold back. They rise when I think of the hundreds of messages, the letters, the gifts, the weeks of food left at my door while I healed. The kindness that washed over the hurt. My family pausing to look at the beauty of what was not taken from us. The quiet gift of friends who came and sat with me. Alice’s care and selfless love that never stopped, day after day after day. The sweet conversations with my children at my bedside. Emmas attention and conversation. Ethans joy he brought me. Eli learning guitar in the next room, getting better and better as my recovery went on.

What I remember most about that time is that I saw all of it. Every moment. I was there. Present. Lying. Sitting. Seeing.

I was as undistracted as I had ever been in my adult life, and the reward was a way of living that I now grieve.

There is a tension in me — to achieve what is in my heart to achieve, and to surrender to that calm I found flat on my back. A place of peace. A place of satisfaction.

I am far beyond blessed in my work. I love my career, and it is not lost on me that I get to wake up every day and live inside a world I made, one crafted from two decades of sacrifice. It is as close to a perfect job for me as I think there can be. But there are almost fifty people whose lives run through it, and an art center my community counts on, and both of those will take everything you give them. As good as it is, it still finds ways to steer itself off the rails and down the side roads I do not want to travel.

It doesn’t happen often. But when it does, it feels so dumb. A date night with Alice, given away. An overnight trip with the family that didn’t happen. A night I could have spent sitting on the floor with a guitar while my kids played drums and bass and piano alongside me.

Sometimes I believe the sacrifices exceed the rewards.

Our life does not care what our calendars say we are going to do. Each day has the power to choose what it wants from us, and it never asks forgiveness. The closer I got to this anniversary, the further I felt from the sweet calm of my recovery — the clarity of what mattered most and the certainty of what didn’t matter at all.

So here I am. A year later. Grateful but grieving.

Reading a wonderful book on economics today — Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered — I hit a single line, and I have not moved on. “Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.”

Is it that simple? Yes. But it is much harder than those words admit. In my recovery I had the easiest choices in front of me. Rest, medicate, eat, hydrate, keep my mind sharp. That was it. My body limited my options, and every choice was easy to make. Now I have all my abilities back, and the choices are staggering.

I did not find that peace. It was what was left when everything else was taken from me. So it isn’t out there waiting for me. If I want it back I have to choose it, again and again, against a thousand other things I am now able to do.

Today at church the sermon was from Psalm 23, and I sat in amazement. If you read my original diary of the crash last year, you will know the significance of that on this anniversary. I won’t rehash it here, but I’ll share some of what was said this morning. You don’t have to believe the Bible to find it useful. I promise.

The first two verses are:

1. The Lord is my shepherd; I need nothing.

2. He helps me lie down and find rest.

He told a story about being young and fixated on his wife’s family sheep farm. He would sit with this passage and watch the sheep out in the field, and what he noticed is that sheep will not lie down unless everything is right. They are nervous creatures. Anxious. Constantly moving to stay alert, to keep themselves from harm. Never at ease. He was puzzled that such a line would be written about such an animal.

King David, who penned the psalm, puts God in the shepherd’s place and us in the field. We do not rest and will not rest until we feel a safety that exceeds our anxieties. We roam endlessly for something we cannot find in ourselves.

As he explained it, I saw myself — moving more and more over the last year to avoid the danger of being still, all while disguising it as ambition. My anxiety is not a fear of death or a fear of survival. It is the fear of not doing more.

I sat this morning in grief and gratitude, thinking about how I eventually have to lie down and trust that what I have done is enough. And that I am safe.

I hope those of you who took the time to read this find some spark of reflection on where you are in your life. If you’re here, like me, you love ideas, you make things, you value knowing. I am learning that all of that is good, but it is not my identity, and it is not as good as the place of satisfaction I found myself in a year ago. I hope the same for you.

The truth is, I could have died any day. Not just August 13th of 2025. It could have been anything. Something unexpected, something I could never have seen.

That is your reality too.

Let’s be sure to live a life that is worthy of what it means to live.