Adopting the Proper Stance

Something like 20 years ago, I found myself in the position of standing in a wide open parking lot with my then-girlfriend attempting to hit me with her pickup truck. (Why I found myself in this position is not especially germane to the story. Suffice to say that I was not then a particularly good decision maker, and even by those standards that this was not a particularly good decision—but I digress.) So there I was, standing in a parking lot, faced with the certainty that I’m going to be hit by a pickup truck driven by somebody who is interested in doing me a tremendous amount of harm.

I did what I felt at the time was the only thing I could do. I charged toward the truck, rather than away from it. Immediately before getting hit, I leapt back in the direction the truck was traveling, I curled my body into a ball, and I tried to aim mostly non-soft and non-squishy bits toward the oncoming vehicle.

The net result was that I was bounced clear of the vehicle—very sore, pretty scraped up, and with a fairly badly injured right arm and shoulder—and took an opportunity to run to safety while she tried to turn the truck around.

Sometimes, you can’t avoid something terrible that’s going to happen; in fact, I think it’s fair to say that a LOT of the time you can’t avoid something terrible that is going to happen. What you CAN do is turn into it, take it head on, and meet it on your terms. Getting hit in the back by an oncoming truck driven by a lunatic could have been a pretty tragic moment for me. By setting at least some of the terms of the engagement, I turned tragedy into a pretty uncomfortable bone bruise and some scrapes and bruising.