Tactical Processes

I had a unique and lucky experience this morning. I was on Fulton crossing Masonic on a green light when my peripheral attention watching my mirrors registered a car passing behind me traveling perpendicular to my vehicle. What I call "intellectual shock" ensued, which is when I know I should be shocked, but I'm not, and I'm more telling myself to be shocked as I mull the magnitude of the situation.

As the intellectual shock process was double and triple checking itself for possible error or misinterpretation of the event, another sensory event occured, this time the tell-tale sound and sight of two cars impacting. Then that process begain double and triple checking itself. So I had two processes, running in parallel, both in states of semi-disbelief that a) there had almost been serious injury to the self and b) an honest-to-god traffic accident had just occured.

As the two processes reviewed the fairly straight forward evidence, they realized they were analyzing the same phenomena. It was at this point (still milliseconds from the start of the first process) the two processes became one, as the impact event process richly defined the exact magnitude that was supposed to be so shocking from the intellectual shock process.

What I found fascinating about how my mind worked here is that the two processes played out in complete isolation of each other, then merged into a single thought. Obviously they were guided by real-world timing, but was still a fascinating peek into how my mind works tactically on the road.