Don't Run Over a Baby in the Middle of the Snow
by James Altucher
 
The car started to skid and swerve and we couldn't stop. It was all my fault.
I had sped up while going into a sharp curve. I was just fooling around. The entire road was ice. My 12 year old kid was sitting next to me.
Why did I do that? I don't know. Because I'm an idiot sometimes. I hope all people are idiots sometimes so I don't have to feel so bad but maybe it's just me.
When we couldn't stop the car from skidding Mollie started screaming. We went into a snow drift and kept going.
The snow was beautiful and white and we were over the top and sitting in a perfect white yard. I put it in reverse but the car was perched in the air above the snow bank. It wouldn't move forward or backward and the wheel just spun in the air.
It was getting cold and dark. I had no shovel and when I went outside to try to kick away the snow around the wheel it seemed almost infinite. I kept kicking but my feet got cold and then I got cold and went back in the car.
Mollie was disappointed in me. "What are we going to do now?" She said. She was angry. But I had no idea.
I could have been disappointed. "Why me?" Or I could have been regretful. "Stupid me!"
I could have also been scared. What if we are stuck all night? Or even worse, what if I don't stop by the pharmacy and run the errand I said I would run for Claudia!
This is a great example of what I call a "difficult gratitude problem." Everyone says be "grateful." It's easy to be grateful when things are going well. Grateful for kids, wife, home, food, blah blah.
It's much harder to be grateful when you know you are an idiot and everything bad is your fault.
So here's what I am grateful for about crashing into the snow and being stuck in the night. I was totally irresponsible and foolish and it seemed like nothing good would come out of it.
A) I spent more time with Mollie.
She was disappointed in me at first. But then while we just sat there in the car doing nothing she showed me a game she was playing on her phone and we spent some time going back and forth, laughing, while she tried to explain her strategy for winning to me.
B) We live in an amazing service world.
I called Claudia, who called Honda, who called a towing service. It would take an hour but a towing service was on the way.
I didn't even have my phone. Mollie had her phone. Total cost: $0. We had some sort of insurance for an unlicensed irresponsible father crashing into snow banks on an icy road in the night.
C) It takes a village.
First one person passed and said, "do you need help?" Then another. Then another. One person helped me shovel. Another person got his own tow truck out. Another person kept finding more chains to link the two cars to help me. Strangers wanted to help. I feltgood about that.
D) I learned about cars.
I said to the first guy: "I think my car is broken now." He laughed. He didn't even know what that meant.
He said it just needed to be moved a little and it would be all right. He told me to cancel the towing service.
We figured I had "front wheel drive". I didn't know what that was. He said, "it means the front wheels drive. Not the back wheels."
And he showed me where the strap goes when a tow truck tows another car.
E) Rope beats Chain beats Nylon.
My car was really baked into the snow. It was like the candle in a cake. We couldn't drag it out. We tried a nylon strap. Then a metal chain. Both broke. Eventually a rope worked.
F) We had a party.
The reason I was outside was I just dropped off my older kid to her "sweet 16" sleepover with friends. Meanwhile, about 7 of us adults were outside in the cold trying to get my car out of the snow.
We were laughing because this was our version of an adult sweet 16. I seldom go to parties for more than 30 minutes. This was about an hour of hangingout and talking to people.
G) I didn't finish the errand.
By the time the car was out, the pharmacy had closed. I never got the medication. And then it turn