something divine shook me by the shoulders

when you see so clearly that everything on the outside is really on the inside

It happened on the second-to-last day of 2024. After dinner, my dad was driving the two of us to a nearby beach, Mission Bay, to go for a walk. As we pulled up to a roundabout, he started telling me about one of his patients, who believed that Dad was her Chairman Mao.

She was a teacher with a traumatised spinal cord. Her father left her two profitable farms that she traded fruitlessly for medical bills. Eventually one of her students introduced her to my father, and he fixed it. Now, whenever she has money, she comes in and sees him for more acupuncture. “You’re my personal Chairman Mao,” she told him, and suggested that they go to Beijing together to pay respects to the original guy.

I laughed, baffled. Dad said, “She’d been haunted by her body for so long that she developed some mental health issues.”

The car wheeled into Mission Bay. Down and up the hills, along the coast. The sun seemed to accelerate toward the horizon, throwing gold across the firmament.

Dad kept talking, finding more personalities in his collection. “There was a former patient who used to drive six hours each way from Whanganui every week, just to see how I was doing. I’d helped him recover from paralysis after a car accident, so he saw me as a kind of savior. He would get really upset if he couldn't make the drive up.

“One day, his sister came in and told me, George, he fell asleep at the wheel on the way up to see you, and the car went over a cliff.”

While I searched for words, Dad said matter-of-factly, “Driving while tired is really dangerous. He recovered the first time, but was less lucky that second time.

“You might slap yourself in the face to stay awake, but it’s not effective. Like I’ve told you before, I used to just slap myself if I felt sluggish, and once woke up going 100km/hr on the other side of the road, surprised awake by violent honking from the car tearing toward me.”

He craned his neck, looking for parking. “And you were asleep in the back,” he put on his blinker, checked the rearview, “and your mother was dozing in the front.”

“What!”

The colors of the world seemed to fade and then brighten. I became aware of a wild torrent in my head, a stream suddenly raised and barrelling down a precipice.

I clarified the only thing I knew for sure. “You never told me this!”

“I thought I did!”

I looked out the window for some help. The edges of the waves seemed to darken and present themselves to me. The ripples were sharp-cut; the blues were saturated. My vision had never been better: so sharp, so clear, so bright.

You’re alive, the waves heaved. Suddenly, there seemed to be an overwhelming amount of weight rolling around in the sea.

I could have died. We all could have.

I nearly died. We all nearly died.

In the car: me, my father, my mother.

“When was this?”

“That was Christmas 2004, coming back from Gary’s. We were on Whitford Road.”

In the car: me, my father, my mother, heavily pregnant with my sister, born January 2005.

In the car: me at seven.

Dad said, “I pulled over really quickly and made your mother drive. I was so shaken by that—fully on the other side of the road, car barrelling toward us—I’ve never tried to keep driving while sleepy again. Resting, even for ten minutes, makes a difference.”

We got out of the car, I made use of my legs, my heart ferried blood around my body, a distant drumbeat I suddenly remembered.

My feet pressed against the loose, gravelly path — a choir of shifting rocks, so numerous, so loud! I perceived how my heels struck the ground, how my arms swung, how surprising it was that these arms existed, and swung; how much life asserted itself in all my senses, how much everything I sensed could have been otherwise.

I’d never breathed such immediate air before. Did my body dissolve?

We hiked up to Bastion Point, a park overlooking the bay. There was a large memorial, sunken pools, and flowers so savagely colored, so brightly and finely rendered in detail, that I suddenly caught a glimpse of every psychedelic trip I'd ever experienced.

Every color and shape was so much, and so clear, that the idea of me, in here, witnessing that, out there, collapsed. There was no medium through which light travelled to reach my eyes; every ray of light in my vision was “me”. That familiar space behind the eyes where experience usually played out spilled forward and merged with every bright edge and surface, such that everything on the outside was really on the inside.

My mind flitted both willingly and unwillingly to the thought of everything I’ve done, the projects I’ve completed. Those things in the world wouldn’t be done if I’d died at seven! Neither would the things I continue to want to do be done. I recoiled at my sense of self-importance. Or rather, I wouldn’t get to be the one doing them.

The sun dropped below a large, dense, clump of clouds, shining out God rays, ladders of sunlight streaming out from the gaps in rich, substantial waterfalls. I suddenly suspected the divinity of everything, all of this which I can see and feel. Or maybe something divine shook me by the shoulders.

If, with one month to go, my sister had been denied a chance of seeing any of this life, any of this world…

I looked at the sunset. I looked at the grass, waving. I looked off the hill at the ten-story cruise ship leaving the harbor, a thumb-sized fragment on which thousands of lives had converged, on which there were smiles brimming and words lingering and brains mulling over new stories and slow-mending spines and slow tempers stoked ablaze, all inching toward the Pacific.

It moved barely at all, and I watched, trying to comprehend, and turned around with my father and together we walked down the hill.

Postscript:

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My father has met so many people and done so many things, and I am only now really beginning to hear his stories. This driving incident I learned about was almost twenty years ago to the day.

I’m sure there are other incidents in which, if the chaotic flailing of the world had varied just a little, I would be dead by now. I’m sure that this goes for you, too. Is there something divine in how the chaotic flailing did or did not play out? I ask this, but think maybe that’s the wrong approach — perhaps it’s more that there is something divine in there being something rather than nothing.