Have you ever seen the movie, "Defending Your Life" by Albert Brooks? It came out in the late 80's and is actually, in my opinion, quite brilliant. For those of you that have not seen this movie, the premise is a guy dies in a car accident and goes to the place that is the step before making it into heaven where you must review key moments of your life and defend them. If you defend it well enough, or lived a virtuous enough life, you are deemed fit to move onto heaven. If you do not defend your life to their satisfaction, then you must return to Earth, be born again, and essentially, do it all over again. Lately, due to circumstances that have occured in the past 11 months, I feel that if I had to defend my life, I would fail miserably, that I haven't lived enough, loved enough, was brave enough, honourable enough. I'm rapidly approaching 29 and I'm analyzing so much lately. My birthday is not the reason that I'm analyzing my life- that would be car accident 2 and, particularly, 3 and now, I'm loathe to admit it but it's true so I'll just say it, on my way to buy an ink cartridge at 8:30 P.M. tonight, a black dog just walked in front of my car. I hit the brakes. My car hit the dog. I didn't run over it, or anything, but I bumped it. The dog got up and walked away (it did seem to be hobbling a bit) and I'm wracked with guilt. The dog walked away, so I drove away and that is what is bothering me. Anyone who knows me knows that I love animals but I didn't know what to do. The dog walked away... it was so weird the way it happened, it just kept coming, didn't even try to get out of the way- I keep going over it in my head but I know that the reality is it could have been so much worse. I keep praying for that damn, stupid dog, as though it were my own, praying that it will recover- a bit wiser from our incident. And frankly, I'm more than a little pissed at the people that let it out- maybe they didn't know it got out and was heading for the street, but someone should have been paying attention. My question is-Am I a bad person for what I did? I certainly feel like one right now.
How ignoble of me.