A Brief Respite from the Day-to-day Monotony

What is it that draws a persons attention to an accident? We've all seen it before, and we've all participated in it: rubber-necking. Something about car wrecks seems to grab our attention and not let us go, no matter how hard we struggle against it. Is it, as the cynic in me would suggest, simple schadenfreude (the joy one finds in watching others suffer), or is it something else?

For many of us, life is nothing more than routine and habit. We wake up, go to work, come home, make dinner, clean the dishes, watch a little t.v., and maybe have a couple of drinks before going to bed. Day in and day out, it's the same damn thing over and over, like Sisyphus and his rock. And then one day something completely unexpected happens; some unforeseen event is allowed to unfold before our eyes, and for a brief moment we seem to shed all the circuits and wires of our robotic existence, and we are allowed to live for those few seconds. Even though it didn't happen to us, still our imagination takes flight. What if it was me in that car? What if that truck had reached that car just a split-second earlier? Might someone have died? I wonder what it would feel like to be in a car as it rolls over again and again? All these questions, along with a thousand similar ones, come racing through our minds all at once--half way perceived, and half way unconscious.

And so it is that we find our own humanity during this brief respite from the day-to-day monotony of life.