I broke my collarbone in a relatively serious cycling accident a few weeks ago. I was descending a hill at thirty five miles per hour and the next thing I knew, my (helmeted) head smacked on the ground and I tumbled for what felt like an hour. While I waited to stop sliding on the pavement, another bike t-boned my rib cage.
While I got fairly banged up physically, the mental effects have been a pleasant surprise. My spirits are relatively high, and I’ve learned how important a healthy lifestyle is to the healing process. In a way, the crash, and my ongoing recovery, are affirmations that my body is in top form and the vast majority of scrapes and bruises I get in the future are negligible.
The crash has also given me a tangible example of how fragile the human body is and how it’s nothing like a machine. It sounds like a silly realization to come to because, duh, but I’m so used to building things on a computer that my brain attempts to plug everything, including organic matter, into the same mold.
For example, when painting, if I make an improper brush stroke, my brain says, “undo.”
In actuality, these things are driven entirely by what nature intends. My collarbone, for example: it snapped like a tree branch, cracked in the middle and bent slightly downwards on each end. I falsely assumed that the healing process would slowly bend it back into its original shape again. In actuality, new bone matter is being generated to fill the gap that was created, but the actual collarbone position is staying in its new “broken” state forever. This new position won’t affect my physical abilities at all, but it is technically in a different place than nature intended.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this. My brain likes symmetry. If something is added above, it should be removed below. The crash caused my body’s structure to be modified permanently. For better, or for worse, it’s a reality check that humans are fragile and can never be made “good as new” again.
While this revelation won’t affect how I live, I will keep it tucked in the back of my head to ensure my priorities in life are sorted properly.
