Embracing My Journey ~ Living with passion & purpose!

I woke to the sound of metal scraping against pavement. Sparks brightened that otherwise gray winter day in 1991. I was hanging upside down inside my girlfriend’s baby blue Ford Escort, suspended by a seat belt as the car hurtled at sixty miles per hour along the westernmost section of the Massachusetts Turnpike.

I was twenty-six at the time. I had been in New York City with my girlfriend the night before, taking a break from my grad studies at Yale and drinking until dawn. While she took a train home to Albany, I had gone to class in New Haven, still drunk, and then set out for Albany myself. On the thirty-mile stretch of the Mass. Pike between Exit 3 in Westfield and Exit 2 in Lee you see nothing but pine trees and the occasional white-tailed deer. Somewhere along that span I drifted into a peaceful sleep.

I remained calm as the car slid along on its roof. There was nothing to do but wait and see what would happen next. The sensation was familiar. I had long been a human missile with no guidance system. One summer evening, just for fun, I’d lifted a love seat over my head and tossed it out an eighth-floor window of a UCLA dormitory; one New Year’s Eve, just before midnight, I was thrown through the plate glass window of a midtown Manhattan restaurant, to the horror of the foursome whose dinner I landed on; I’d been accepted at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and then was thrown out, before attending my first class, for lying on my application; and I had developed a habit of blacking out from drinking.

I felt a searing pain as the roof of the car, slamming against the turnpike an inch from my head, crimped around a clump of my hair and yanked it from my scalp.  The seat belt dug into my chest, drawing blood that stained my shirt. At last, the car stopped, leaving a wake of scrapes in the pavement. I unbuckled, fell on my head, and screamed, “Fuck!” After forcing the door open with my shoulder, I sprinted away from the car, afraid the gas tank was going to blow.

We have a remarkable ability to respond instinctively to life-threatening danger. The problem comes after that initial, instinctive response: The body shuts down. A state policeman found me shaking violently on the side of the highway. I still can’t remember what happened after I got out of the car. I could have been standing on the side of the highway for thirty seconds or for thirty minutes.

“Son, you’re one lucky son of a bitch!” the trooper screamed while shaking his head in disgust. “I’ve seen plenty of Escorts flip, but I’ve never seen anyone survive. I don’t like having to pull dead bodies out of wrecks, so how about being more careful?”

His words didn’t register. I had beaten death again.  Click here to download pdf and continue reading….

BIO: Thomas Matlack is a fan of all things cool and good. That includes my wife Elena, three kids, Ray Allen, Lady Gaga, Laura Munson, and Nick Flynn. That’s today. Tomorrow I’ll have a new list (except for the wife and kids, they are for keeps).  He is the founder of www.goodmenproject.org

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