What does it all mean? 51 years old still living on a treadmill for nearly half a century. A self created Merry Go Round that once you plug your quarter into cannot stop…seemingly will not stop. Life moves by like looking out a mass transit bus window for 30 years as it drifts to 27,482 stops. Each street filmed in black and white, a gray so deep it no longer exists as a color but takes on its own reality. Street by street the hundred blocks go up through each season, repeating a multitude of similar events.
Suddenly a child waves, a dog barks, a pretty girl smiles at me. It’s stop number 18,210. I want to get up, walk to the automated door and spill out into her world, ask her name, maybe even kiss her. I’m trying but I can’t get out of the seat. I’m on a planet with a gravity well so deep it makes my arms feel like lead. Einstein and his relativity do not exist for me here. It’s the Twilight Zone and Mr. Serling is on the red horse, across the platform slowly smoking as he introduces the audience to my life.
So, lately I’ve had the thought. The thought to stop it, and not just slow it down a bit. Slowing it down doesn’t work, we’ve all tried slowing it down. Throw a wrench in the gears, cut the belt, short the wires and BURN it down. I wonder what the world will look like when it stops, what will happen when I get off.
How much do you leave behind in the burning rubble? Can I take the good parts with me on a new journey, a future where I decide. A morning where the whole entire day belongs to me. Selfishness, conceit, wonderment, fear, longing and desire. Air that fills your lungs deeply and feels fresh and clean like when the sky was new. Water so cold and pure it quenches a lifelong thirst.
I’m afraid to takes this step, I’m afraid to end the comfortable, the nominal, the usual. But I have to do it, I know that now, many of us know it. There’s an emptiness in all of us. An aching chasm longing for a truth that’s often questioned and never answered. The answer for me may be that there is no answer; the answer for me may be that the journey to find it is the answer itself. And if there is truly no way to fill an empty soul I say give me a cup a day, let me pour it in and taste it, let me walk in new places, find new realities, get off the bus.