mark-reed.net - the philosophy of commuting

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUTING

It’s a familiar story to at least some of us, if not all. Awoken from slumber rudely and abruptly. The roar of alarms. The squeak of doors. The dull, exhausted yawning of the sleepless.

We always seem to be somewhere we don’t want to be. Doing something we don’t want to do. Going somewhere we don’t want to go. This morning, like many others, is no exception.

I’m standing on a dull suburban platform. I’ve been here forty minutes (or, if you prefer to think of it, two thirds of an hour), just waiting to go away from this place.

The usual same old story.

I swore I would never be like this. I swore I’d be different. Better. Somehow, not like them. I swore I would never be a commuter.

You always turn into the thing you hate. You don’t mean to but you do. A small set of compromises become a complete conversion. Like a alcoholic, it is not a formal decision, but a series of small steps, a series of small decisions, that become a big decision.

I am a commuter. Like everyone else in the world. I know I am not special, or different, I’m just another person. Another bloke. The world is full of them. But I am not like everyone else. I am myself. Me. The things that make us special and different are the things that make us beautiful. And in time we will all be both uniform and unique.

And whilst you will see me, a uniform figure in a crowded, late train, I will be both like everyone else and no one else, I will be anyone and someone. It may take me two hours to travel a nineteen minute journey thanks to the vagaries and incompetence of British Rail, it may take me a lifetime to find out what makes me happy, to work out what makes me think, what makes me feel, what I believe, but the point of the journey is not to arrive. It is to travel. Life is a journey. The point is not to arrive, but to make it to the end.

Unqiue and uniform. The universe is amazing, and mundane. And the mundane is amazing. There is beauty in everything : but the eternal question is if it can be found, if it can be seen. If we can follow the example of that beauty, and become as beautiful as the world is. The beauty in everything. In her eyes. In the sunrise. In the symmetry of weapon and the mechanics of engines. There’s beauty in electricity. And in everything. Even the smallest, most mudane things.

Do we have the time left on this earth? Before The President assigns the alignment of the signs? Before the self-appointed prophet ascends in the Rapture? Before the angels descend with trumpets to take one to another plane of existence and the heathens burn in their Hell of Flat Earths? The fate of mankind hangs in the balance, and a moron is in the control.

“If Catholicism ruled the universe we’d still be living on a flat earth with hell below and heaven somewhere to the left of the moon”.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws