A Journey Down Amboy Road

I was alone driving my Grandma's 1999 white Honda Accord to pick up my sister from her friend's house. It was late so there was nobody on Amboy Road except a raccoon along the side of a road.

As I was staring at the raccoon, I picked my head up and saw a large cargo truck driving in the opposite lane. There was about a foot of distance between the truck and my compact Honda because of the notorious narrow Staten Island roads. On one hand, my first impulse was to make sure that I avoided hitting the massive truck. On the other hand, I had the impulse to turn the steering wheel so that I would hit the truck in a head-to-head collision. The more dangerous part in me envisioned the grim scenario in an instantaneous flash:

Would I survive it?

Would I be in the hospital for a few weeks?

Would I be in a coma for the rest of my life?

Of course, this quick curious vision did not justify the risks of figuring out the outcome. However, my over-analytical Lehigh brain kept thinking...

Let's say I did turn into that truck, then the outcome was either death or something as close to death as possible. On a casual drive to pick up my sister the possibility that I was only a foot from death scared me. As a young kid, I always thought that death was something very far away, so I never put too much thought into it. Yet I suddenly realized that at any moment I could be a foot from death.

All it takes is one drunk driver, one person having a bad day, or one ridiculous scenario and my life could cease to exist. The fact that I could not reconcile this grim scenario made me uncomfortable.

But I let the idea sit for a while until I had a revelation: if at any moment in time I could be so close to something negative, then at any given moment I could be so close to something positive. Perhaps I am one article away from becoming a famous writer, or one connection away from meeting someone famous, or one person away from meeting the girl of my dreams. In the present moment, we constantly staring down the path of two different realities.

It is easy to focus on my negative circumstances and how my circumstance is less than perfect; however, I also realized how close I am to success at any given moment.

For example, a no-name rapper like Post Malone releases a song like "White Iverson" and suddenly becomes one of the biggest upstarts in rap and featured on Justin Bieber's songs. Justin Bieber releases a video of him singing on YouTube and gains the attention of Scooter Braun- the rest is history. Similarly, Desiigner releases "Panda" and he gets praise from Kanye West. Nobody knew about any of these stars until one key decision.

Granted the possibility of being hit by a truck and dying is possible in our everyday lives. However, so is the possibility that we have the breakthrough we have been waiting for.