We Don’t Get Hurt Enough

When was the last time you cut yourself? No, not intentionally, silly. When was the last time you accidentally SLICED YOURSELF OPEN with an implement of brute cutting force and power where the ensuing wound(s) resulted in profuse bleeding and brief body shock that made the edges of the room get fuzzy and your hearing go a little dull? For your sake, I hope it has been awhile since you’ve experienced such things. For me, the last time would be approximately 20 minutes ago. 

I can still feel my heartbeat in my thumb, and me no likey. 

I’m a big proponent of believing that no good southern boy should ever leave his home without a knife of some variety on his person. There’s rarely a day that I don’t end up using my smallish pocket knife for something mudane. I only mention this to make sure that all of the background information is present and you, using your widely-impressive common sense, can surmise that i’m not a complete idiot who shouldn’t be allowed to wield anything more pointy than the average bowling pin. That being said, tonight was certainly one of those times when the thought, “I shouldn’t be cutting this at that angle, maybe I should…” was unceremoniously truncated by my largish Gerber trying its best to eat the tip of my left thumb (and a little bit of thumbnail, just to further prove the point.) 

After I bandaged myself up and stopped wanting to faint, I started thinking that we don’t get hurt enough anymore. It says a lot about my physical risk-taking that I can only recall a few times over the past few years when I got hurt (and most of those involve being hit by cars while riding my bike in Tallahassee.) I think that falling down and scraping some errant body part every 20-30 minutes for most of my childhood WAS A GOOD THING. It taught me to suck it up and move on. Kids deal with pain so much better than adults do. I don’t want to be so insulated and safe that I forget what being hurt feels like. I’m not sure why, really. It’s not like I DESIRE pain, and it’s certainly not what I want to welcome into my life on a regular basis, but there is something life-affirming/life-giving about physical pain that tends to wake me up to the reality of my surroundings. I think I forget i’m human sometimes, if that makes any sense.

As a sidenote, i’d wager that you don’t pay attention to which fingers you typically type with, as I am now realizing that my left thumb was the cornerstone in my well-timed and honed spacebar-ing AND the beloved apple-key anchor point for 85% of the shortcuts I use. This is going to put a severe dent in my words-per-minute awesomeness.