Looming Down the Gates of Heaven

What a near-miss accident taught me about inner peace.

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and founder of BestPsychicDirectory.com. You’re reading his articles on Bob Olson Connect.

Photo by Brandon Frie on Unsplash

In one way, it seemed like nothing worth spending a moment thinking about. In another way, it felt like something huge, so enormous that I didn’t have words to describe it. This is me trying to reconcile the two.

It was Sunday afternoon. We had a relaxing day by the pool with our dogs—pretty much a perfect day. We decided to go to a nearby store in search of a gift that had been eluding us. Melissa wanted to take the Spyder, our three-wheeled motorcycle. I hesitated because I’d just taken a shower and knew I’d have “helmet head” for the rest of the day. Realizing this was a silly reason not to take the Spyder, I agreed.

Our Can Am Spyder

We hopped on the motorcycle—me driving and Melissa behind me—and went down the street. No more than twenty-five feet down the road, we passed our neighbor, also named Bob. I didn’t notice him until he was beside us, upon which I waved my hand so that he might see it in his rearview mirror. As Bob’s pickup truck drove by, the vehicle behind him was a gigantic, navy blue GMC pickup driving on our side of the road straight towards us. I assumed he was avoiding a pothole on his side of the road, as there was no other reason for him to be in our lane (unless he was texting).

There was no time to react. One second, the wind of our 35-mile-per-hour movement was cooling the 95-degree air, and the next, I stared into a massive grille with the letters GMC as if it were the gates of heaven. In moments like this, time slows down. In this case, it might have stood completely still. I was thinking, we’re going to die. There was nowhere for me to steer away from this truck. There wasn’t time, plus I was already driving on the right side of my lane, and there were trees if I went any further to the right.

Interestingly, I didn’t even brace myself for the impact. It was as if my body surrendered to whatever fate was delivering us. While this felt like it took place over a few minutes, it was over in a split second. The driver of the oversized pickup truck abruptly noticed our motorcycle and swerved back into his lane. It was so close that we felt the wind from the truck as it passed us. It felt like the breeze of death.

Melissa had been looking down, and in the opposite direction of the truck, so she never saw the vehicle approaching us. Once it had passed, she asked me, “What was that?” She knew something had happened from the breeze of death but couldn’t put it together. With adrenaline flowing through my veins and a bit of shock, all I could say was, “We almost just died.”

It was a nonevent for Melissa, but it felt like a religious experience to me.

As I continued driving down the road, my mind was flooded with thoughts. I wondered, would we have died, or would we have been mangled in a New York minute, spending the next several months having surgeries and rehabilitation, possibly leaving us paralyzed or brain damaged? Would anyone think of our dogs waiting for us to arrive home within the hour? How would the police know who to notify? I never got those documents back to the lawyer. How might that affect our living will? And what about my new book? What a shame if it never got read.

These weird and random thoughts filled my mind as I continued driving.

Ten minutes down the road, we stopped at a traffic light. I looked back at Melissa, “That was close.” Not having the same experience I did, she responded, “Well, we didn’t get in an accident, so it’s behind us.”

I wanted to adopt that attitude, but the truth was that it wasn’t behind me. It was very much with me, and it continued to be in the days that followed. Very little was said about the incident, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Yet, the contrast between my experience and Melissa’s made me aware of something fascinating and enlightening.

Melissa and I were so close that we could feel one another’s bodies while sitting on the motorcycle, yet our experiences at that moment couldn’t have been further apart. Additionally, in the minutes, days, and weeks following the incident, our mental and emotional responses to that incident were vastly different, like two sides to a coin. I was thinking “what if?” questions (what if we died, what if we were seriously injured), and she wasn’t thinking about it at all.

Contemplating the contrast between the two experiences tickled me. I thought of Mr. Magoo, a cartoon character Wikipedia describes as a man who “gets into a series of comical situations as a result of his extreme near-sightedness, compounded by his stubborn refusal to admit the problem.” Created in 1949, Mr. Magoo is the epitome of the human being who is completely unaware of the risks and dangers around him as he moves through life with one near-death experience after another (and I’m not talking about the NDEs of the afterlife). Yet, his ignorance of the threats to his well-being leaves him happy and content—always with a slight smile on his face.

Melissa was Mr. Magoo that Sunday afternoon as the looming GMC truck brushed by us. I now fully understand the meaning of the phrase “ignorance is bliss,” which refers to the idea that “a person who does not know about a problem does not worry about it” (Merriam-Webster idiom).

I’m reminded of my youth. My friend Mark used to tell his mother about the shenanigans we’d get into at night, only to have her repeat, “You don’t need to share everything with me. The less I know, the better.” She knew she couldn’t control what we did at night, so she preferred the peacefulness of not knowing.

In the early years of my investigations of the afterlife, I would pay my bills by ghostwriting books for people. They would tell me their stories, and I would write them into a book. I had one client named Calvin who kept repeating that his children didn’t know what they didn’t know. It was his way of calling them naïve and lacking in experience.

Recently (twenty-five years after writing Calvin’s book), the concept of “not knowing what we don’t know” took on a positive appeal for me. Maybe we don’t need to expose ourselves to certain realities of life to be in the know. Perhaps not knowing is the secret to peace of mind. It certainly was in Melissa’s case following Sunday’s incident. My high school friend’s mother surely found this to be true. And I saw the direct contrast between being in the know and struggling with that information following the motorcycle incident.

Growing up as a teenager in the 1970s, I’ve often enjoyed watching That ‘70s Show. The writing for the first seven seasons was incredible. Their ability to find comedy in the middle of dramatic scenes was their true talent. There’s one scene in the show where the mother character, Kitty, asks the father character, Red, why he’s so hard on their son, Eric. Red tells his wife that he has to be hard on Eric to prepare him for life because life is tough. She responds to her husband by suggesting that maybe, instead of being tough on Eric as a child, it would be nice if Eric could enjoy his childhood before he learned that life can be challenging.

Since the onset of the Internet and smartphones, the speed at which we are informed today is lightning-fast compared to my childhood. We used to get the newspaper twice daily and watch the news at five or ten o’clock. Most of that news was hours or even a day behind. My parents didn’t watch the five o’clock news because of us kids. They waited for the ten o’clock news when we were sleeping to protect us from information children didn’t need to know.

Today, there are twenty-four-hour news shows and headlines pinging on our phones in real-time, never mind our friends texting us when something outrageous has happened. Because we want our children to be safe, we give them phones that give them direct access to this ongoing information. Yet, we find ourselves amidst a generation of anxiety-ridden youth and suicide rates beyond comprehension.

Perhaps a little ignorance is in order. Maybe “not knowing what we don’t know” is a blessing. Is this hinting toward the secret of inner peace? Melissa’s experience last Sunday tells me it is. My buddy Mark’s mother believed it was, as did the brilliant writers of That ‘70s Show. And maybe this is the reason Mr. Magoo always had a smile on his face.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with this subject. Thank you for reading.

Love,
Bob

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers about the Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the top directory of psychics, mediums, and animal communicators, BestPsychicDirectory.com. This is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.