Too Close For Comfort

Everyone has those key events in their lives. Those pinnacle moments that will forever effect the rest of their days. Sometimes those moments are blatant, epiphanies even, like the first time you realize your in love, overcoming a great fear or a near death experience. Other times theses moments are more subtle and it takes a bit of reflection to realize how important those are. Yesterday I had an experience that was somewhere in the middle. I'm going to call it a near near-death experience that instilled a great deal of self-reflection.
I was upstate at my sisters in Moncey this Shabbos. Saturday night there was about 4 inches of snow and ice that fell,causing me to spend the night (it wasn't a big deal- I like it in Moncey). I left on Sunday at around noon. As soon as I started driving I had a bad feeling. The roads were still quite icy, and the wheel didn't seem to be in my total control. I was taking it slow, and figured by the time I got to the Palisades it would be fine. Unfortunately, the highway has not plowed incredibly well, and it certainly wasn't salted. About 5 minute after I got onto the Palisades, my car hit an ice patch. I saw it coming and slowed down. It didn't matter. My car spun around 540 degrees. First I was in the middle of the highway with cars buzzing by me, and miraculously missing me. Then I fortunately drifted off to the side, and finally ended up in a small snow bank off the road. The fact that I didn't get hurt at all, nor did my car get the slightest scratch on it is a bit of a Nes, no? I easily could have collided with another car, or skidded at a part of the highway that had a railing, and then would certainly have been somewhat hurt, and my car severely damaged. But I went off the road at one of the points that had no railings, only forest. I didn't even hit a tree. And I just sat in my car just breathing for a few minutes (of course no one stopped to help or see if I was OK- it's NY after all). I relaxed, composed myself, and waited patiently until it was safe to get back on the highway.
Shockingly enough, five miles down the road my car hit another ice patch and I began sliding at a 90 degree angle, this time with cars all around me. I remembered what I did wrong on the first skid (hitting the breaks) and just let the skid take me, and Baruch Hashem I managed to drive out of it unharmed, still on the road. The odd thing was my reaction to the two skids. On the first one I was very relaxed, didn't say anything and thought to myself "Huh, this kind of sucks, hope I don't hit anything." It was like I was watching a boring movie that had a brief exciting scene. But on the second skid I really got nervous, and scared. I blurted out "Please Hashem, no." I guess I had a late reaction to the intensity of the first slide. I'm really not sure exactly why the two reactions were so different.
About ten minutes later there was a traffic jam. As I moved on I saw why: There was a horrible car accident, two cars hit each other head on. Now this highway has a good 30 feet of forest separating the two directions of traffic which means that either a) two cars decided to play chicken on a one way highway and neither flinched (highly unlikely) or b) One of the cars spun around like mine did, but unfortunately this person got hit my a car coming straight on. I think choice b is probably what happened. What made this even more intense was that there was blood all over the hood of one of the cars. I hope that person is OK, but judging by the severity of the damage and the blood I'm not so optimistic.
Of course my next line of though was obvious "Man, that could have been me." It certainly got me thinking. Yet in a certain sense one could say that really nothing happened to me. I wasn't injured at all. I was 100% fine (and so was the car). I wasn't nearly killed because I didn't have any physical harm happen to me. I think there's a lot of truth to this approach, but I think the second skid combined with the bloody accident is too much to just ignore. So I then I had to give a lot of consideration to what Hashem was trying to show me, and I'm still not sure to be honest. I have a few theories though. The first is seemingly simple but all to relevant: saying tfillat haderech. This is something I've been bad at. I don't mean to be but I have a way of being forgetful. I do a lot of traveling and should be saying this prayer quite often, but I just forget a lot of the time. I've been on plain rides to Israel, and 6 hour bus rides when it was my responsibility to say it for a group, but it just slipped my mine (just as it did on my way down from Moncey). Now I know I won't be so lax with it in the future. Maybe my scare was in essence nothing more than a scare to make me realize this simple, but important facet.
The other possibility that occurred to me is that life is short and it can just end at an instant. Maybe I should stop being afraid to fully push for my dreams, and to go all out for them. If I died yesterday I would have left this world as a work in progress. But then again I'm only 23. How many people around my age who pass away are complete successes, having accomplished all their goals? I don't even like to think I had a near death experience per say, it seems a bit to over dramatic. Perhaps If I had, chas vashalom, hit something then maybe. But I didn't, and baruch Hashem I'm OK. Yet I will push myself a bit harder to accomplish my dreams (and I have three, so hopefully one of them will come true), but I think the main focus and the main lesson learned from this ordeal is to say tfillat haderech. It's small, simple, and yet it could save your life.
In the end I don't think this was one of those pivotal moments, just a close call. But that in itself was reason enough for some introspection. Perhaps in a couple of days I'll look on this differently and take some crazy gung-ho action. I'll have to wait and see.
I'm open to any other theories on this of course, so don't hold back if you have something of interest to say.