A little over a year ago, I was driving home from a bookstore café on a cold night when a car rear-ended me at full speed. I remember the headlights swelling in the mirror. I remember knowing, in that half-second before impact, that there was no time to move. What I don't remember is the next few seconds — just the sudden quiet of being sideways in the median, several hundred feet from where I'd been waiting at a red light.

I'm writing about it now because the longer I sit with what happened, the more it keeps pointing me back to something I'd been avoiding: nothing about the next moment is actually promised to us. We know this intellectually. Most of us organize our lives around pretending otherwise. And sometimes — if we're lucky — something cracks the pretending open just enough to let a little honesty in.

The Night the Bakery Was Closed

Before the crash I'd had one of those conversations with a friend that leaves you feeling, briefly, like you're on the right track. Grateful. A little clearer. I got into my car. I stopped at a light on a wide suburban road. Then came the mirror, the headlights, and the sound.

Afterward, standing in the median with flashing police lights around us, I learned the driver had fled, hitting several other cars on his way out. A small group of us gathered on the grass — strangers, shaken, oddly social the way people get after something awful. One of the women said it was her birthday. I looked across the intersection and saw a bakery.

I thought: I'll buy her a cake. Right now. We'll eat cake in the median. It will be absurd and perfect. We walked over, the whole little group of us, half-laughing. The bakery was closed. We stood there on the grass looking at the dark window, and something in me quietly rearranged itself. The tenderness of wanting to buy a stranger a cake at a crash site felt as real to me as the collision itself. Maybe more so.

Why We Keep Pretending the Next Moment Is Guaranteed

I like to think life is more predictable than it is. We build careers, raise kids, save for retirement, make dinner plans, and quietly assume the next moment will look basically like this one. Most of the time, it does. That's the dangerous part — the frequency of our assumptions being correct trains us to stop noticing them.

Then a car runs the red. A phone rings with news. A biopsy comes back strange. A marriage ends in a conversation nobody meant to start. The future you'd been quietly furnishing in your head disappears, and you're standing somewhere you never planned to stand.

Here's what I've come to believe: we can't actually insulate ourselves from any of it. No amount of planning, saving, exercising, or careful driving will make us untouchable. That realization can send a person into real fear. It can also, in a different mood, wake them up. The question isn't how to make life safe enough that nothing terrible can happen. That version of safe doesn't exist. The question is who we want to be while we're here.

What "Being Present" Actually Means (Not the Instagram Version)

Presence gets thrown around like a wellness buzzword, and I'm wary of how glossy it's become. What I mean by it is less decorative. It's the practice of noticing what's actually happening — in my body, in the room, in the person across from me — instead of being pulled around by the story my mind is telling about it.

I've spent decades looking for ways to live with uncertainty without being consumed by it. I don't think there's a trick. There are, however, some practices that genuinely help, and they're not complicated:

• Notice fear without becoming it. Fear shows up. It doesn't have to drive.
• Observe your longing for approval. Let it be there. Don't let it pick your choices.
• Get curious about the empty places. The ache you keep trying to fill with something — food, scrolling, work, a drink — is pointing at something. Sit with it before you medicate it.
• Tell the truth about what matters. Especially to the people you love. Especially today.

None of that is glamorous. None of it will trend. But it's the actual texture of being awake, as far as I can tell.

When the Searching Takes You Somewhere Unfamiliar

Some people arrive at this kind of reckoning through loss. Some through therapy. Some through meditation benches and silent retreats. Others — more and more these days — through plant medicine and psychedelic work. I'm not here to prescribe a path. I will say that the people I know who've sat with ayahuasca, psilocybin, or San Pedro often describe a shift that sounds, from the outside, strangely similar to what happened to me in that median: a sudden, undeniable recognition that this life is temporary and that most of what we worry about is noise.

If you're reading this and quietly researching whether a retreat might help you make sense of something — grief, addiction, depression, a pattern you can't seem to break — I'd just gently say: do your homework. Talk to people who've been. Vet the facilitators. Understand the preparation and the integration, which are honestly where most of the real work happens. The ceremony is a doorway. What you do in the weeks before and the months after is the house you actually live in.

For readers who want to explore further, a range of curated plant medicine retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here.

Standing in the Median

I'm writing this at a park, barefoot in the grass. Kids are shrieking on the playground. The wind is doing that thing where it moves through the trees in waves. I'm breathing. I'm here. Somewhere right now, someone is stopped at a red light without a thought about what might come through the intersection. That's not a judgment. That's most of us, most of the time. It's how human minds work.

Being awake, as best as I can define it, means knowing the next moment isn't promised and choosing to step into it anyway. It means doing the work that feels like yours. Loving the people in front of you even though you can't keep them forever. Letting the bakery be closed and finding, somehow, that the walk across the intersection with strangers was already the thing.

We can't prevent every collision. There's no guarantee the bakery will be open when we show up. But we can stand together in the median for a while, look around, and say the simplest, most radical thing: we're still here. That's enough to stop, breathe, and notice what an extraordinary thing it is to be alive.