"Transit"
The slow drum of transit is well suited to considerations of one's life. Perhaps this owes to the greater proportions of trains and airliners, compared to personal cars, which illicit a sense of larger, more significant movement; a metaphor of one's own super-transit through time and meaning.
Many small motions may combine to cover a great distance. We meet one person who the next day introduces us to another. This elaborate train of one-thousand acquaintances and instances winds elaborately to marriages, births, murders. How are these stops connected? Was our present position inevitable? Staring at one's feet as we do, it is difficult to know. We shuffle through time, a nudge in this direction or that, too busy feeling to look upwards and backwards for our bearings.
The swing of limbs as we rush about, flesh-and-bone pendulums, movements of an organic timepiece. The rolling rhythm of the heart signals the scroll of an internal odometer, wearing up the miles. We are moving, moving, moving, but where?
Where does all this jostling bring us in the long run? After years of movement, do we dare to look around and see? Are we just outside the womb? Have we been dancing in place since youth, or huddling in the same drab rooms as when we first met tragedy? Is all motion merely shifting in circles, or worse, toward collision?
The speeding train takes me by the shoulder and shakes firmly, "look around." It is time to ask how far I have come, where I am, and where this route is headed.
Michael Spotts:.
Copyright 2011 www.theopenlife.com
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