In just a moment

A young woman in my town died last week. She was a freshman in high school, whose boyfriend was put off a school bus for fighting over a cell phone. She followed (to help? to watch the fight? without much thought as to why at all?), fell, and was killed instantly under the wheel of the bus.

That kind of thing shouldn't happen. One thoughtless action shouldn't be fatal. We should all get those extra seconds that allow us to step back and think. We miss an elevator. A friend calls our name. The bus door jams. And 3 seconds of thought make a new choice.

If the water had been a bit colder the night Jeff Buckley died swimming in the Mississippi he might have stood ankle deep in the water and thought, after a moment, "maybe not." And turning back, he might have had a Johnny Cash-long career, fumbled his way through greatness and failure, and have written and recorded music that a 1,000 years from now some teenager on a spaceship faraway would listen to and love. But the water was warm, and it happened the way it happened. And it was one tiny choice that shouldn't have been fatal, but was.

And would that young woman have had the possibility of something remarkable? We don't know. She was too young to even guess. Those 3 seconds never came. That fleeting thought that would have kept her in her seat. The jammed bus door or the voice of a friend that would have come between her and a something so momentary it could hardly even be called a choice, but turned out to be fatal.