Perfectionist Rehab

I often contemplate what constitutes reality.

Specifically, what attributes must a condition possess to render it true?

What makes something correct, and what makes it wrong?

I’m truly beginning to believe that everything is chalked up to perspective.

To illustrate this phenomenon, I’d like to present to you a situation that occurred when my eldest son was two months old. My husband and I decided to go for a walk in a small town in Maine with our two dogs, and our baby.

I was manning the stroller while my husband walked in front of us with the two dogs. We were walking uphill, on a sidewalk, on the right side of the road. On the left side of the road was an apartment building. The bottom floor units had access to the street.

One of the apartment doors was open. Out of this doorway barrels a dog who was bearing all signs of aggression. His ears were pointing back, his fur was bristling, and he was snarling.

The strange dog was charging right towards us.

Time slowed down.

Adrenaline.

Fear.

Stress.

My husband braced himself for the bleak possibility that he would have to fight this dog. He alone would be responsible for protecting himself, our two dogs, his still-in-the-trenches-postpartum wife (myself) and our newborn baby.

 My husband geared himself up for potential injury. He acknowledged even the potential for our dogs being seriously hurt or dying.

I completely froze. I panicked – terrified for my dogs, my husband, my two-month-old baby, myself.

There was no time to react. There was no time to plan. There was no way to escape.

We were in danger.

Simultaneously, a car was passing by. The driver was speeding.

The dog jumped on the street.

The car slammed into the dog, propelling him through the air.

The dog smacked into the sidewalk.

The neighbors came outside to see the commotion. One of the neighbors was visibly contemptuous and was quick to inform me that the tenant who left the door open was a drug addict. He consistently left that door open while he got high. His dog didn’t wear a leash and was never contained in any way.

I learned that the dog running out into the street was a pattern.

His neighbor believed that the tenant shouldn’t be allowed to own a dog at all because he couldn’t even take care of himself. The dog’s owner comes out of the apartment, visibly inebriated. He ran across the street wearing nothing but board shorts.

Understandably, the man was panicking because he thought he was about to lose his dog. The driver pulled over to the side of the road, got out. He was hyperventilating.

“I’ve just hit a dog. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

It was in this moment that I realized that both men were in hell.

While I was haunted by the sound of the dog thwacking into the car’s hood, I have never been more grateful in my life.

If the dog’s owner had allowed that situation to teach him a lesson, he might have purchased his dog a collar. He might have begun closing his door before he partook in his extracurricular activities.

Maybe the experience was a turning point for him that resulted in his pursuit of sobriety.

For the man that was driving the car, perhaps this presented the opportunity for him to start being a bit more aware of his own surroundings. Perhaps he would start abiding by speed limits.

I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I was acutely aware that if that man had never hit that dog, there was nothing preventing the danger my entire family faced that afternoon.

That man is my hero, and I never got to tell him.

It’s horrible that that dog was seriously injured, or perhaps killed, because ultimately his owner didn’t do right by him.

It was awful that the driver was now going to have to deal with certain consequences of not paying attention.

But I was so grateful that he didn’t pay attention at that moment.

This is why I think about perspective so much. In this scenario, I had something to be grateful for. My family were spared. We were protected. We were safe.

Those two men likely felt that that was some kind of karmic atrocity that happened to them. pull them out of their patterns that resulted in other people getting hurt.

In all the commotion, my husband, my dogs, myself, and my son just watched the tenant collect his dog and jump into a car for an emergency room visit.

The driver continued hyperventilating on the sidewalk.

I still wish that I’d gone over to him and thanked him for what he did, because he saved my family. He was truly in pain, but this situation furthered my belief that there are no coincidences in life.

Perhaps if I had told him that he saved my little family, I would have eased his suffering.

A small voice in my head told me not to say anything. The driver needed to process the consequences of his actions.

We have never walked along that street again.

I truly felt that somebody was looking out for my family that day. I was grateful for the protection, but I also hated that I was looked after in a way that resulted in other people entering their own version of purgatory.

 But what really happened here? Was I truly being protected by an unseen force that simultaneously provided karmic retributions to the other two men?

Did our three spheres converge at once to give us all what we needed in that moment?