Accidents Happen And That Stinks -Then You Learn And That's Gold

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Whenever I see an athlete have an accident like US figure skater Ilia Malinin did in the men’s singles event at the Olympics recently, my heart breaks. He fell twice, though he was favored to win. It’s hard to watch a stack of intense dreams fed by years of hard effort crash to the ground, or ice, in a split second. Accidents, things we never wished for, mistakes, bad luck — they are some of the most painful life lessons the Universe so generously shares with us.

I had no idea until I looked it up, but all this time, Ilia Malinin has been training at a skating rink just six miles from my house. He goes to college a handful of miles from my house, too. How many times have I passed him in my car? My sister was the one who said to me, “You haven’t heard of The Quad God?? He lives right near you!”

Perhaps like many of you who’ve seen it, when I saw his face in the Olympics footage, it crushed me. He’s young, with so much intense pressure — the weight of his reputation, of the cameras, of all the eyes in the world watching. How can a twenty-one-year-old handle all that?

Hard to say. I think it must be the intensity of the dream. I can relate to that. I, too, had a running dream that used to live in me and powered years of ambitious running. But my dream had nothing in the way of eyes watching me; it answered to no international reputation and expectation. It was my own dream to enjoy, and then to mourn privately when a trampoline accident ended its 35-year tenure.

Accidents will happen whether you’re anonymous or world-renowned, and they teach us plenty if we sit at our desks like good little accident-prone students and pay attention to their lessons.

Accidents span any category you could ask for. The other day, I ripped the side trim off my car. We’ve had this ice-snow covering the area in which I live — its birthing snowstorm dubbed “Snowcrete” because of its soul sister, concrete — and as I made a right turn, I failed to skirt the iceberg jutting out like its own country, and wham. Goodbye side trim.

I was stunned when I heard the loud ripping noise as I turned. Oh no! But that’s an accident for you. You’re stunned. You think, “No, no, no!” You grapple with this new truth. Then, as you sit at your desk, a student of accidents listening to the lesson that day, you learn, you grow, you typically become more aware, you forgive yourself if you’re an A student, and you move on.

For the loss of car trim, it’s not a lengthy process to move on. For the loss of a running identity, it takes some effort. For the loss of an expected gold medal — I can only imagine.

You know the saying: Accidents happen. They sure do, and take your pick.

There are accidents caused by dropping things — for example, one of the two glasses my mom gave me from her stash that I gushed over when I visited her recently. “I love these glasses!” I told her, sipping my cold brew, enamored with the fine glassware in my hand.

“You can have it,” she told me as she opened her cabinet, “Here, take all you want.” She motioned to the stash on the shelf. I was gleeful. I took two, so as not to be greedy. I hid them in my own, dedicated cabinet in my kitchen back at home, so to be greedy. I dropped one shortly after. It cracked. I said, “Nooooo!”

I know you know how this goes.

There are accidents caused by inattention. You press the wrong button, and suddenly your delicate washing machine load is being run through hot water, or your coffee maker is churning out far more than your cup can hold, or you meant to mute yourself on a crowded work Zoom call before sharing an off-color comment with your dog, Jester.

Sometimes things are going to go awry, even though we can’t imagine why or how they could.

I’ll never forget the story someone told me once about the time their parents got in the car after finishing their bathroom break at a highway rest stop, buckled themselves and their oldest son in, and continued their road trip journey. Meanwhile, back at the rest stop, my friend said she continued to snooze away in her infant car seat, sitting in the shade under a tree in the grassy area next to the big building.

It took Mom and Dad twenty or so minutes to realize their baby was extremely quiet in the car. The rest is history.

I listened to that story and shook my head. How on earth? I couldn’t imagine leaving my baby on the side of the road. But it happens. In fact, I heard of another instance of roadside infant forgetfulness in the years since I heard my friend’s story. It clearly happens in the world, as much as it seems unimaginable. That is an accident for you: nothing we want to imagine.

The thing that makes accidents worth it — sort of — is the lesson they teach us afterwards. Truly terrible accidents are never worth it, but they do teach some kind of lesson. Everything is a gift or opportunity, as Shirzad Chamine says in his Positive Intelligence program. We’ll never be glad that an accident happened, but there is something we learn from it — even if it means we learn how to become solace to those who experience similar hardships in the future.

This is how my heart experiences Ilia Malinin’s two falls in his men’s singles performance on the ice in Milan recently. I know he will have a mountain of processing to go through in these coming years as he, one hopes, continues to train. Whoever is mentoring him (his figure-skating parents, for one) will have had skating mishaps in their careers, too. They’ll take the wisdom they gained from their experience — the gift — and use it to help Ilia through it — the opportunity.

This is how it goes: misfortune appears, we recover, move on, and then help others new to the scene of mishap. We don’t become the teachers of the lessons. Only the mishap can do such a thing. Instead, we become a support system to help the learning begin. For Ilia, there’ll be a lengthier class on the subject. For a broken glass, it’ll be a quick webinar on how to pay attention better. Regardless, you can be sure we’ll be students in that classroom for the rest of our lives. I’m not a fan, but that’s life for you.

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Hope your week goes well, my friends.