Swerve

If my life these past few months were a video game, it would be Frogger.

Like most of the classic games of my childhood, Frogger had a simple goal: don’t die. The bottom half of the game screen was a highway, across which drove digitized versions of cars and trucks and semis, each one ready to squish the player’s frog into oblivion. The top half was a river with various floating threats and allies. To advance past a given level, a player needed to guide Frogger through the gaps between automobiles, then hop along atop logs and turtle shells to reach the other side.

Sounds easy enough. But the gaps in traffic disappear quickly, and the river is full of hungry alligators. Frogger was notorious for the number of ways a player could die—not simply because of the dangers themselves, but because of where in time he or she encountered them. A moment’s hesitation is all it would take to go from daredevil to roadkill.

All of which is fine in a video game. In real life, it’s terrifying.

This nugget of unsettling wisdom hit home last week when I received a call from an EMT in Council Bluffs saying my mother and a family friend had been involved in a traffic accident. “She’s okay,” the message said. “But we are taking her to the hospital.”

To put it kindly, those were mixed signals.

Details of the wreck aren’t entirely clear, but it goes something like this: Brenda and Mom were pulling out onto the highway when a pickup crested the hill to their left. Recognizing they could not back up in time, Brenda hit the gas to try to get out of the way. The truck clipped them in the rear fender, sending them across the median and onto the shoulder of the oncoming lanes. Had Brenda stopped or even hesitated, the pickup would have caught them broadside, likely doing far more damage to their bodies with the impact.

I don’t want to make the accident sound more dramatic than it was, but neither do I want to minimize it. Given what could have happened, a few bruises and cracked ribs sound like a good trade-off—at least to those who don’t have to live with the pain in every cough or yawn. But the crash did a lot of damage to both property and person. Just because it could have been worse doesn’t mean that it wasn’t still bad.

I’ll leave it to Mom to tell more of the story if she chooses. But I think she would agree when I say that Frogger is best played on the video screen rather than in real life.

There’s another lesson here, I think. The surest way to get splattered is to sit still.

One of the reasons video games do such a good job of mimicking real life is the added element of time. A 1000-piece puzzle or a chessboard present interesting problems, but only in three dimensions. Video games throw a fourth—time—into the mix, so that the world of the game is constantly changing. Wait too long to respond, and your actions will fail, because they are based on a set of conditions that no longer exist.

Frogger is not simply a matter of avoiding danger. To win, a player has to maintain forward motion. You have to dodge threats, of course, but you also have to keep moving toward the goal. Failure at either task results in catastrophe.

Life is like that.

I realize how easy it would be to say that this is all ultimately pointless. Our piddly lives don’t amount to much, and we will all die sooner or later. Why spend so much time and energy when the end seems so predetermined?

I wish I had a better answer for that all-too-human query. I am not philosopher or psychologist or theologian enough to get very far in addressing the fleeting nature of living in a body.

But here’s what I think I know:

We’re in motion, like it or not—born into a world we didn’t create for purposes we can’t quite comprehend. We constantly encounter threats that feel just as heartless as they are random. But time moves in a single direction, and we know the fate of those who sit still. So we keep moving forward with the hope that there’s something worth striving for on the other side, beyond the highway and the river and the assorted dangers in between.

And if we learn to swerve and don’t give up, we might just find out for sure what wonderful things await.