Defining moments come as explosions. They’re sudden pockets of enlightenment that come without warning or prelude. And yet, you’ll find that in movies and novels, there’s always a build up. Every story has those common attributes that we know and find routine in. Rising action, climax, falling action, etc.
But real life is a far cry from well thought out literary/cinematic masterpieces. In these, we perpetually seek out arbitrary things.
Balance and chaos.
Good and evil.
Black and white.
But in the real world, when making decisions for yourself and for others, most of the world operates in shades of grey. While it's difficult to use this analogy without snickers of jokes regarding lewd novels, there’s an undeniable ambiguity in the decisions you have to make when you have something or someone on the line.
So much so that it’s only in these shades of grey that you’ll find your defining moments, exploding between gunmetal and slate, or silver and chrome, lighting up your discoveries and finding yourself born anew.
It began with a simple plan. Hang out with friends. Get food. Watch a movie. Looking back, if that day hadn’t turned out the way it did, I doubt I would have even remembered it at all. But then again, no one ever writes stories about the days they sat at home binge-watching episodes of Friends. I remember that day so well that I can still hear the sirens.
Cars get obscenely hot in the summer. That’s what I was thinking when a woman ran out of the house next to my friend Sam’s, barefoot and yelling, a cordless landline phone gripped tightly in her hand. She ran right up to Sam, who was just leaving her home. I didn’t know what was going on and got out of my car, walking up to her and trying to contain my bewilderment.
She asked for Sam’s mom, implored her to hurry and after no explanation, turned back toward her own house. We sat down on Sam’s steps, watching as her mother went to join the distressed woman. It was when Sam’s mom resurfaced, shouting, “Does someone know CPR?” that I found myself running, too. Running toward her.
Back when I got my lifeguard certification, my mom was annoyed. “What a waste of two hundred bucks,” she told me. And while a lifeguard certification did require a fee of two hundred dollars, it was, at the time, my proudest achievement. As a teenager, very few jobs were available in my area and lifeguarding was one of the most efficient ways for me to make money. Little did I know that I’d go from scooting around children in kiddie pools to pounding on a man’s chest, trying to get him to breathe.
That was the moment when I exploded.
Somehow, my training kicked in. The man’s two children were sitting on the bed next to me as I rhythmically did compressions, counting off in my head. And between the quiet sobs of “Daddy,” beside me and the lack of a rising chest below me, I looked around in anguish before I decided to break the no direct-contact rule of CPR and I pressed my bare lips to the man’s and blew into his lungs. His chest started to rise. But before I could have a moment of victory, he started to seize. He gripped my arms tightly as he rode out the fit. When he stopped, I got myself free and continued compressions until the paramedics arrived.
I left the room, walked down and out the front door. Something in me wavered while I considered the then unknown fate of the stranger. I didn’t realize I was crying until Sam asked me what happened.
You’ll grow up your whole life thinking you’re a specific kind of person and it’ll take something immeasurably unexpected to shake your foundations. In my explosion, I didn’t realize at the time, but after I finished wiping away those tears, I ricocheted through the spectrum of grey until I landed somewhere between lead and iron, with a newfound skin hardened by both.
