How a Crash Put Me on Course

On this day seven years ago I had a fortuitous car crash — if something like that exists. Although I have always been interested in inquiry, spanning science and philosophy, it is this event that set me on course for SPLectrum.

I got what could be described as the equivalent of a Windows blue screen of death while driving on the motorway. The lights went out. I lost consciousness at motorway speed and was knocked around by other vehicles without any memory of the collision itself. When I woke up I was stuck at the central reservation, facing oncoming traffic. I wondered how I got there. I still have no memory of what happened while the screen was blue.

I can’t complain. My system rebooted and I had hardly a scratch on me. The doctors never found a hard cause for the blackout. Physically I was through it within days.

My poor central computer took a bit longer to recover. No functional damage but I was thinking in slow motion and tired as hell. Simple sentences took effort. Things I usually reached for without looking had moved a little. I had to notice myself noticing, and that was new.

It rubbed my nose in how much I valued thinking and studying, and how central that kind of mental activity is to who I am. The slow-motion weeks were a forced inventory of a life I had been conducting on autopilot. I really got set on retraining my brain to its former glory — not out of fear, out of recognition. I wanted back what I had been taking for granted.

So I picked up my interest in philosophy again and decided to pursue it seriously. I decided to refresh my foreign language knowledge and extend it, so I could read works in their original languages. I decided to strain my brain and hopefully make some more sense of what life is about. And in doing so, I discovered that this crash, as traumatic as it had been, had put me back on a course of learning with a destination I might never have found otherwise - the World of SPLectrum.

Now, don’t take me the wrong way. The destination is not some claim of something great. No, the destination is a seat of learning. And my mind has something it always wanted, an anchor point to weave thoughts and ideas around. To start explorations. And if I have one burning ambition, then that is to achieve a true interdisciplinary and consistent view of all things under the sun. I decided to go on this journey in public, so that whoever finds it and sees something of interest can make use of it as they see fit.

How a blue screen of death rebooted me into a well-appreciated direction. I’m not sure I recommend the method. But I’m grateful for what it set in motion.

This post is part of the preamble, about happening before SPLectrum saw the light of day.

Photo: NeONBRAND / Unsplash