There’s this place nearby where the railroad ends.

It’s four miles from my house as the crow flies.

If you take this rural road due west toward another, then a sharp right on Swing Road to a hard left on a long, winding stretch of farm-dotted blacktop, it reveals itself just before Catsburg.  You can’t miss it.

On approach it looks like any bucolic spot where tracks cross pavement.  It could be any place you know.

To the left at this timeless crossing lie familiar iron bars.  No longer in use, they are crowded by pine arches and adorned by mounding wildflowers.

You have likely seen it.

The mystery lies not west of the road but within the magical patch to the right.  You see, the tracks are no longer there – not in the narrow open rectangle or its adjacent treeline.

I have ridden car and bicycle over this exact piece of pavement a hundred times.

A recent weekend outing led me back.  Filled with anticipation for the expected rise in the road where the tracks cross, I was surprised and even disappointed to find no lift of my car at all.

I had never noticed before – the anti-climactic lack of any sign of railroad at the railroad crossing.

I know what you’re thinking.  It’s likely the tracks are right where they were laid.  After decades of added blacktop, the road has leveled out at the point of intersection with the tracks.  You’re probably right.

What struck me wasn’t the literal explanation of the perceived absence of tracks but the interruption of my expectation.

Imagine it.

I’m moving along at country-road pace.  The car window is 1/3 down to take in the last of Indian summer.

Boom-chugga-chugga-chugga, boom-chugga-chugga-chugga

A favorite CD is spinning, and I am singing.

Boom-chugga-chugga-chugga, boom-chugga-chugga-chugga

I am pumping on all cylinders.  As we say in the South, I am cooking with grease.  I’m comfortably in the zone when out of nowhere – BOOM!

Just like that, I’m derailed.

Expectation interrupted.

~~~

When was the last time you were traveling along at lightning speed, wind at your back, all cylinders firing?

Close your eyes and recall.  You are a virtual machine.  Sure of your destination and your means, nothing can stop you.  You whistle in the wind, and the sun shines on your back.

Boom-chugga-chugga-chugga, boom-chugga-chugga-chugga

When suddenly, BOOM!

Expectation interrupted.

Eventually we all share the experience.  It’s one of life’s equalizing forces.

When we look back, we can often see the signs of impending disaster, but in the moment it’s a complete surprise.  We find ourselves reeling, flying off our rails, unable to reach our intended destinations.

At best, life winds to a screeching halt.  At worst, we are derailed, tossed into a mud puddle in an unknown field, our luggage or baggage and life experience tossed to the wind.

~~~

Just last year I met a woman, a grandmother, who was twice derailed.

Fifteen years before our meeting, she learned her daughter would soon die of a rare cancer.  The girl, just entering her second decade, had an infant son.

At the daughter’s death, the grandmother defined herself and harnessed incomprehensible grief by taking charge of the boy, raising him with all the love and care with which she had raised her girl.  She had renewed purpose.

After 14 years, the boy fell ill with the same rare cancer.  Within a year he, too, was gone.

The grandmother’s story sets up the second question we all at some point ask as we sit by the tracks and gather our gumption to go on.

The first natural question is why?  The answer we ultimately reach is that pain is inevitable.  Life isn’t fair.  We aren’t always meant to know.

The second, harder, question is this: what next?

What next when your second child faces the same painful, unfair and untimely death?

What next when your last 15 years have defined you as the caregiver, steward of life?

What next when no child remains to define your purpose?

Who are you?  Why are you here?  How will you ever go on?

What next?  What next?  What next?

~~~

Derailment knows no color or status.  It’s like the rain.

Carl Sandburg makes note of life’s universality in his poem “The Fence.”  Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing but Death and the Rain and To-morrow.

Derailment is life’s rain.  It’s coming to everyone at some point, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.  No self-imposed division, protection or self-definition holds muster in the end.

The context of your screeching halt – your rain – may be health, wealth, relationship, identity, career, purpose or anything in between.

All that’s sure is that it’s guaranteed.

~~~

A friend summed it up at lunch last week.

“There is a natural order to life,” he said.  “There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

I have long claimed that the universe has a way of working things out.  She has her own justice along with a unique set of checks and balances.  Leaning too far one way requires a universal correction in the opposite direction.

List too heavily toward service and love of others that you neglect yourself?  BOOM!  The universe will work it out.  It’s only natural.

(I know her, for the record.)

Avoid conflict at the expense of conversation?  BOOM!  The universe will light the spark that brings it all out in the open.  The universe clears the air.

Stuck in a relationship that doesn’t serve you or your ‘other’?  Never fear – your correction is coming, too.

These examples imply we are participants in our derailments.  Often that’s the case.  We make the choices that steer our directions, after all.

It’s also true at times we don’t call for our derailments at all.  Life is full of forest fires and other natural acts that don’t require our participation.  They happen with or without us.

The forest fire is, in fact, a great illustration.  When our homes and other man-made structures succumb to fire, they are destroyed.

When Mother Nature lights a forest ablaze, she starts a chain of action necessary for life to continue.  By burning creation, she creates the conditions that promote life.  Fires in nature make room for life to revive and continue.  Destruction, unintended and unearned, is necessary for the survival of the planet.

It makes sense, then, to relate derailment to Sandburg’s rain.  Like fire, water can destroy.  It’s the strongest force on Earth.  And like the forest’s fire, it is both natural and absolutely necessary to sustain life.

Derailments, the universe’s corrections, are equally natural and necessary.

~~~

What next?

It remains the perennial question.

The best answer of what to do when life hits you hard may be to not do.  Don’t undo, redo or do something else.  In fact, don’t do anything at all.

When life takes the time and care to kick us off course, the most respectful response may be to stop all doing and simply sit still in that open field, surrounded by the remnants of life before.

Our job is to stop talking, certainly stop thinking and cease all forms of action.

The universe has something to say; it behooves us to listen.

Wisdom and truth, even hard truth, are found in silence and lack of motion.

Put your mind on pause and open yourself to what’s there.  The possibilities are as unique as we people.

• Relief that you’re no longer fighting or grasping for something that wasn’t yours
• Permission to change direction
• Acceptance that you aren’t in control, that’s there’s nothing to fix
• Perhaps acceptance that life is not fair
• The still small voice of hope that we don’t have to know today
• Peace with the reality that we may never know or understand

Your unique path and experience will bring the answers you seek – and if you weren’t seeking, a whisper from the universe that she’s at the wheel and there’s going to be another direction.

Sit.  Open yourself.  Stop reaching and directing.  Be quiet and still.  Turn off your brain.  Feel what’s there that you were so busy you couldn’t sense.  Hear what isn’t spoken.

Pain is inevitable.  Suffering is optional and comes from failing to let all be as it is, even (and especially) when it’s unfair or unjust.

Your only job is to be attentive, to receive and to accept, without judgment and without question.

~~~

Today I took my own advice and drove to the railroad crossing at Catsburg.  I observed and listened for what’s there for me.

I felt the cold winter wind cutting through my soft red overcoat.

I saw deep pools of rainwater gathered along the roadside next to the railroad tracks.

I smelled the previous day’s rain and heard the rustling of dry winter weeds.

Right there before me was a brand-new universe I would never have experienced if I hadn’t come flying off my rails to be at that place in that unique time.

I saw something else.  Sharing this is an admission of sorts.

Hidden beneath a canopy of trees on the east side of the rural road, is something unexpected.  Just steps from the road in winter’s sparse decoration lie the once hidden tracks emerging from the crossing to continue onward into life past the spot of my derailment.

Once again, expectation interrupted.

The tracks, just like nature and life, continue on their way.

The greatest gift in this ongoing process of refinement – the stripping away of what doesn’t work or perhaps an unexpected and impossible loss – is having another opportunity to rise after falling, to correct after listing too heavily one direction, to forgive others and especially oneself, to remain grateful and to take one step closer toward your purpose.

Thank you, universe.