Who is to blame?

It is often the times when we are least expecting and relaxed that something crazy, out of this world, and unexpected happens. Just when we take our eyes off the ball, it comes and hits us right in the face. At times, it may be due to no fault of our own, making it extremely challenging for our minds. Just imagine you’re driving a car, not over the speed limit, not outside your lane. Simply driving is how organised traffic is meant to flow. Behind you, there is this entirely normal driver who is simply in a hurry. Nothing out of the world, yet they just want to get someplace faster, and they are driving like it.

It seems like a normal time on the road for most people, right? Now, all of a sudden, the person behind you has lost all of their patience, and they begin speeding up behind you and honking. Putting you in a position where you have to move entirely out of the way, so you do. You move out of that lane and into the one right next to you on the left. Problem solved, right? Not exactly; the lane that you just moved into was empty until a car moving relatively fast caught up to you moving into the lane, and boom. Your ears still ring from it, and you can still feel your hands hitting the car side door as hard as a hammer. Your head hits the window and bursts it open. The next thing you remember after the blur of pain and noise is yourself waiting in the hospital.

All of these people stand up around your bed, looking at your face with pain, some even with disgust. Some see a worry in someone they care about being in pain, and another sees a problem that they would have to deal with. Then you hear doctors asking if you want the good news or the bad news, and despite wanting to hear the good news, you still ask for the bad news first. What you thought was a normal day of driving turns into something that you’ll have to live through for weeks and even have to deal with for maybe months, with remnants that you will see for years. All of this time goes by in your head thinking about what is going to happen later when you realise you still haven’t left the hospital bed.

You can’t blame yourself, and those whom you can blame cannot be held accountable, so what now? Will this just stay like a weight over your shoulders for a while until you forget it ever happened? Is there no way for something to take the blame? Just so that you can take it off your shoulders and there is something that I can look towards when dealing with the consequences gets most difficult. A loose pipe will overfill a container unless there is a place from which the container can leak the overflow. Who is to blame when no one is entirely to blame? Or what if we don’t? What if we don’t leak the overflow? What if that overflow went somewhere else? What if that overflow is what helps power everything else? Instead of letting the container leak out to spoil something else, we can use the overflow to water a garden. Take care of the garden so much that it is almost as if there is nothing around it that is unfortunate. Yet that may be almost too perfect, isn’t it?