The Day I Chose to Stay

Recently, I’ve been listening to Elizabeth Krohn talk about her near-death experience and how profoundly it changed the way she understands time.

One of the things she describes is the idea that our moments still exist where they happened—that time may not actually be the linear thing we experience it as. From our human perspective, yesterday is gone, today is happening, and tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.

But what if that is only how we experience time?

What if, from another perspective, it is all there? Almost like a recording you could rewind or fast-forward through to experience any given moment in time.

Elizabeth also talks about free will. She has described seeing things before they happened. She used the example of a plane crash that ultimately did not occur because a repairman noticed a loose screw and fixed it.

That caught my attention.

Because if a future can be seen and then changed, perhaps what was seen wasn’t an unavoidable future at all.

Perhaps it was a possibility.

And hearing her describe time this way has caused me to look differently at something that happened to me many years ago—an accident I have written about many times but have never published.

I thought I understood what happened that day.

Now I’m realizing there may have been much more happening than I ever considered.

I was running late.

Before leaving, I put on my seat belt, but something about it wasn’t right. It was hanging loose. As I was preparing to go, I audibly heard my husband’s voice.

It wasn’t simply a thought about him.

I heard him.

The sentiment was completely him—his concern for me, his wanting me to be safe—and it stopped me.

I turned the car off, got back out and adjusted the seat belt.

When I got back into the car, I pulled it tight.

Too tight, actually.

But I was already so late that I left it that way, started the car and drove off.

For years, I thought of that moment for one reason.

That seat belt helped save my life.

A short time later, another driver moved into my lane and made contact with my tire.

My SUV began rocking back and forth.

Then it started sliding.

And then it flipped.

What should have lasted only two or three seconds became something entirely different for me.

I have been reading and listening to many accounts of near-death experiences, and one of the things people frequently describe is a life review.

My experience was not the same as many of the NDEs I have heard described.

I did not leave my body.

I did not see another being, and I was not greeted by deceased relatives or any divine presence I would describe as God.

I did not travel somewhere else.

But I absolutely reviewed my life.

And that is where the experience of time became so extraordinary for me.

While my car was spinning through the air for what could only have been two or three seconds, I experienced what felt like hours of thought.

Not scattered thoughts. Not flashes.

I went through my life.

I thought about what I had already done.

I thought about mistakes.

Regrets.

Bad choices.

Things I wished I had done differently.

I thought about love.

I thought about my husband and what my death would do to him and to the other people who loved me.

I thought about the child my husband and I had tried so hard to have and still had not had.

And I thought about something I had carried with me from the time I was very young.

I had always felt that I was supposed to help people somehow.

For a long time, I thought that might mean becoming a nurse, probably because my mother was a nurse and I admired her. But by my early twenties, I knew nursing wasn’t my path.

The feeling remained.

There was something I was supposed to do.

Something I was supposed to give.

Something I had not yet fulfilled.

Sometimes I thought about it often. Sometimes years passed while I was simply living my life.

But during those few seconds in the air, it mattered.

I thought about things I had wanted to create.

Stories I had not written.

Things I had dreamed of doing but had never done.

I wasn’t taking inventory of accomplishments.

I was taking inventory of what felt unfinished.

And after all of those thoughts, something became very clear to me.

I said it out loud.

I’m not done!

I remember feeling it with absolute certainty.

And then I said:

I can’t die!

I was not begging.

I wasn’t saying, Please don’t let me die.

I wasn’t bargaining with God.

I was stating it.

I was not done.

I cannot tell you how that choice worked, any more than I can explain how two or three seconds became what felt like hours to me. I can’t explain what happened beyond what I was able to perceive.

I can only tell you what I experienced—and what I know from being the person who experienced it.

I chose to stay.

Time was not linear for me in those moments.

I don’t need anyone else to interpret those things the same way I do. I can only share my experience and leave you to take from it whatever you will.

Then the car landed.

And the moment it landed, all of those thoughts stopped.

Suddenly I was back inside ordinary time.

The SUV was sliding. Glass and sparks were coming toward me through the windshield. I could hear cars around me slamming on their brakes.

And that was when fear finally came.

That is something else I only recently realized.

I had not been afraid while the accident was unfolding.

As I realized the other driver didn’t see me, I was almost matter-of-fact about it.

He doesn’t see me.

He’s going to hit me.

He hit my tire.

The car is rocking.

Now it’s sliding.

Now it’s flipping.

Even during the life review, I wasn’t afraid.

But once the car landed and I heard the traffic around me braking, I became afraid that another vehicle was going to hit me.

Several times, I said out loud, “Please don’t hit me. Please don’t hit me.”

When it was over, the roof above the seats had been crushed down to about shoulder level.

All of it except the space directly over my head.

And then I walked away.

Not unchanged.

Something in me was different.

My husband and I had spent years trying to have a child. Almost immediately after the accident, we decided to seek help and try again.

I became more intentional about the people I loved.

I started caring more about having good, healthy, joyful experiences with the people in my life and less about wasting hours angry because someone cut me off in traffic or behaved badly toward me.

I had always been an optimistic person, but that part of me expanded. I also became more compassionate and forgiving.

I wanted a happier existence—not only for myself, but for the people I loved and, really, for everyone.

Other changes came more gradually.

My husband and I began making decisions that allowed us to have more time for ourselves, and eventually our children, instead of spending so much of our lives working.

That affected the jobs we chose.

It affected where and how we lived.

We bought a home with a mortgage we could afford without working so much that we had no time left to actually enjoy our lives.

Over time, I became more intentional about the people I surrounded myself with too.

I became more willing to let go of people whose presence brought more negativity than peace.

And I continued searching for whatever that lifelong feeling of purpose actually meant.

Eventually, I found writing again.

Ironically, writing had been the first thing I chose for myself as a child.

By third grade, I knew I loved telling stories.

What I didn’t understand then—and still didn’t understand during my accident—was that the two things I had carried separately for most of my life might actually have been the same thing.

I wanted to tell stories.

And I wanted to help people.

But maybe my purpose hadn’t fully revealed itself yet because I still needed to live the experiences that would give me something to offer others.

I hadn’t yet spent years caring for my mother through dementia.

I hadn’t become a mother myself or lived through the immense joy and health challenges that would come with raising my children.

There were so many parts of my life not lived yet.

It took me many years to understand that perhaps the stories were how I would help people—but maybe I also needed to live some of those stories first.

For a long time, I believed the profound part of my accident was what happened while the car was spinning in the air.

The life review.

The strange experience of time.

The choice.

I’m not done.

I can’t die.

But Elizabeth Krohn’s description of time has made me widen the frame.

And that is where something new occurred to me.

I had always thought:

I heard my husband’s voice. I stopped. I fixed my seat belt. That helped save my life.

What I had never really considered was this:

Stopping also delayed me.

Had I gotten into the car and driven away when I originally intended to, I would have been somewhere else on the freeway when that other driver reached that point.

Maybe our paths never would have crossed.

Instead, I stopped.

I got out.

I fixed the belt.

I left later.

And I arrived at exactly the place where the accident happened—

with my seat belt secured.

That realization has been difficult for me to stop thinking about.

The thing that may have changed my timing enough to put me there was also the thing that prepared me to survive what happened there.

It put me there safely.

I had never thought of it that way before.

And suddenly I began wondering whether the accident was simply a random event I survived.

Or whether it could have been some kind of pinpoint in my life.

An intersection I was meant to encounter.

I don’t know.

I’m not ready to say I believe that certain moments in our lives are predetermined. But I don't think it's impossible. And I think it is worth exploring.

Maybe there are certain experiences, relationships, or turning points our higher selves intend to encounter, while free will still determines what we do along the way.

I think about the lines at amusement parks.

You enter the line knowing where it leads, but along the way there are exit doors.

You can change your mind.

You can leave.

You can continue.

The destination can exist while the choice remains yours.

And I also think about those choose-your-own-ending books.

You reach a turning point in the story and are given different options.

Choose this and turn to one page.

Choose something else and turn to another.

The pages already exist.

But you still choose which one becomes the story you experience.

Maybe life is nothing like that.

But it gives me a way to explore ideas I am only beginning to understand.

Perhaps multiple possibilities can exist at once.

Perhaps free will determines which possibility becomes the life we experience.

That could also explain why someone might glimpse a future that later changes.

Maybe they didn’t see the future.

Maybe they saw one possible page.

And then someone made a different choice.

When parents learn that they are going to have a child, they begin imagining an entire life.

First steps.

School.

Growing up.

Relationships.

A career.

Perhaps children of their own.

And when someone dies young, part of what people mourn is often the life that person never got to have.

The possibilities.

The things that could have been.

So where do those possibilities exist?

Can more than one future be possible at once?

Can one be perceived before it happens and still be changed by free will?

And if time isn’t actually linear, could birth, childhood, adulthood, death and everything in between somehow all exist at once within a much larger reality while we experience them one page at a time?

The more I listen to people describe near-death experiences and the way they experienced time, the more I find myself believing that linear time may be a human experience rather than the true nature of time itself.

Which makes me wonder again about those few seconds inside my car.

There are scientific explanations for why people may experience time differently during extreme circumstances.

I understand and acknowledge that can happen.

But in my experience that day, something else was true.

I believe that for those few seconds, I briefly experienced time more as it actually is.

Perhaps ordinary human consciousness narrows something enormous into a sequence we can manage:

Now.

Now.

Now.

And perhaps occasionally something shifts and we become aware of more.

I have believed for years that human consciousness is capable of far more than we understand.

I have also had moments throughout my life that I can only describe as knowing—times when something came to me before I had enough information to logically know it.

Those experiences have made me wonder whether ordinary consciousness is only a small portion of what we actually are.

My own way of imagining consciousness has become something like an enormous pool.

To me, that pool is collective consciousness.

It is also the Creator or God.

All that is.

When one of us is born, I picture it as though a scoop is taken from that pool and temporarily given an individual form.

We become ourselves.

We have our own body, personality, relationships, experiences, choices, pain, love, mistakes and understanding.

We experience ourselves as separate.

But I don’t believe we ever completely stop being part of the pool.

When we die, I imagine that scoop returning, carrying everything that particular life experienced and learned back into the whole.

And when another scoop comes out, perhaps it contains pieces of many who have come before—possibly more of one than of others.

Not necessarily one complete person simply being born again intact, but consciousness continuing—mixing, learning and experiencing itself in new ways.

I don’t know that this is how reincarnation works.

I don’t know that this is precisely how consciousness works.

It is simply the image that, so far, comes closest to what I believe.

And within that image, my higher self would not be some completely separate being watching me from somewhere else.

It would still be me.

My scoop.

But perhaps the part of me that remains connected to the larger pool has access to things my everyday human consciousness does to not.

Maybe that connection is where some of our knowing comes from.

Maybe it has something to do with the way I experienced time.

Maybe it had something to do with the choice I made while my car was spinning through the air.

I don’t know exactly how those pieces fit together.

I am exploring.

I am learning.

And my beliefs are still unfolding.

What I do know is that I left that accident differently than I entered it.

And now, many years later, I am discovering that even the meaning of that day may still be unfolding too.

I used to think the story was about surviving.

Then I thought it was about choosing to live.

Now I wonder if it is also about purpose.

Free will.

Timing.

Possibility.

Consciousness.

Maybe that accident was not a moment when I was supposed to die.

Maybe it was the moment when I was supposed to wake up.

To start exploring what I believed, moving toward the things I had put off, and paying attention to that sense of purpose I had carried for so long but had allowed to become stagnant.

Or maybe I reached that particular possibility through a series of choices—mine and other people’s—and once I arrived there, I had another choice to make.

Perhaps I will never know exactly.

And I am becoming more comfortable with that.

Because I don’t have to know precisely how something happened in order to know that it changed me.

I don’t have to understand the nature of time to know that, for a few seconds, I experienced it differently.

And I don’t have to understand the mechanics of consciousness to know that, in that moment, I chose to stay.

Maybe this is part of what becoming conscious means.

We experience something.

We give it meaning.

We live awhile longer.

We learn more.

And sometimes we turn around years later and see the same moment from an entirely different place.

The accident itself lasted only seconds.

I may spend the rest of my life trying to understand what happened inside them.

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For much of my life, I didn’t spend much time questioning what I had been taught. And even after I realized organized religion did not feel right to me, I mostly left it there. I knew what I didn’t believe, but I hadn’t spent much time exploring what I did believe.

I think many of us do that. We inherit beliefs, assumptions, and ways of understanding the world, and then we get busy living our lives. My accident changed that for me. It made me curious. It made me start asking questions.

I don’t believe everyone needs to arrive at the same answers. In fact, I think we should explore, learn, question, and decide for ourselves what feels true. It is what I encourage my own children to do.

You don’t have to agree with me to be part of the conversation.

If this post stirred questions, a different perspective, or an experience of your own, I’d love to continue the discussion in the Blog Club Hub.

You are always welcome here.

🌿WGG