It was 3:30 AM early Sunday morning as I was driving home from a show in Delaware. There is a special kind of quiet on the highway at that time of night. A fringe society of travelers caught between the twilight of closed bars & unopened fast food breakfast chains.

I was 15 minutes from home when I saw two oncoming headlights barreling down the wrong side of the highway. With little time to react, I suddenly swerved to the left lane and was lucky that the oncoming speeding car passed me just to the right. I pulled my car over to the shoulder in attempt to collect my bearings and within 30 seconds saw two police officers chasing after him. (I’ve since learned that no one got hurt that night. The man driving the car was “confused” and was pulled over by the police before he injured himself or anyone else).

Sitting in my car on the shoulder of the road I felt a weird calm come over me. Nothing like the calm that occasionally comes to surface in the pit of my stomach saying “take it easy,” but rather a sleeping bag like calm that wrapped me up and said, “you got this, it’ll all work out.” Maybe I was delirious from the late night or possibly confusing this feeling with humility, but the peace was palpable.

“We are all at the mercy of each other,” I thought to myself.

There is so much at stake, yet so much that’s entirely out of our hands.
Our ability to endure great pain & find healing.
Our desire to love deeply & be deeply loved, maybe to marry or occasionally divorce.
We are all at the mercy of each other.

To me it seems like control is really just the ability to pull over and collect your bearings every once in a while. How lucky for us that we get the time.

Love,
Seth