I sat in deep contemplation of the events of the recent months, my eyes staring out the window vaguely following the flow of traffic, my mind elsewhere entirely. Someone walks her dog, a yellow lab, and for a brief moment a sense of nostalgia guides my thoughts further into the recesses of yesterday. I think of my loves living their own lives, and also of the dogs who I will never see with these eyes again, and I can't help but wonder if everybody has some invisible timer floating above them that will suddenly turn to "too late", and our eyes will never meet once more.
It is with this frame of mind I see a tow truck dragging away a silver SUV, possibly a murano, hard to say. I have some interest in vehicles, and all I could get from it was a passing observation of its color and potential make. Even to sentimental me, its nothing, just another towed car really. And to other observers, it probably does not even earn a passing conscious thought. It hits me hard that somewhere out there are the owners of the car, frantically searching everywhere for their lost one. Where could it be? What happened? The thoughts of the money and especially the time spent to take care of it and now its hauled away like its nothing? I suppose its okay, its just a car, an inanimate object. You'd have to be a real weirdo to feel bad for the thing, people may say. Yet there it goes, and somewhere someone yearns.
It reminds me of a scene in "A requiem for a dream", when the mother of the protagonist is hauled away to get medical treatment for her overdosing on diet pills. Shes being strapped down and screaming for help and having her stomach pumped and all sorts of veritable torture while the medical assistants are having some trite discourse of something completely inane and irrelevant. Shes nothing to them. She had even become nothing to her son, and just another nearly-dead to her sunbathing companions. This woman with a story, with faults, with joys, with ambitions and tragedies and just simply time alive.. is reduced to nothing. The love she has given, received, shared… now just a collection of neurons lurking somewhere in the depths of her unique mind.
Discarded. She was young too, once. As we are now. Young, fresh, with our mind full of all the possibilities that may lie ahead. A plethoric orchard of experience to be enjoyed at our leisure. And we pay no heed to the elderly, some with their callous remarks and others with their sad understanding that when we are them they will be no more.
Our parents raise us with such care and doing their best, in whatever misguided form, to protect us from any harm. And there are even those who were never so lucky to have this. All of us running around treating our lives as if they are just our own. Yet still with each of us having vested interests in the other, why is it so difficult to see that our own lives are not truly independent? Our choices are not without consequence, and the consequence is never limited to the narrowest of perceptions of our own lives. Maybe this truth is too well known, and too weighty for some to contemplate, so they choose to don blinkers/blinders like a workhorse and drag the carriage of their past baggage along with them, desperately trying to carve out a tiny scrape in an ever changing world.
I think about religions—god, our disparate notions of who He is, what He is, and for some what His Absence is. With or without, religious, agnostic, or atheist, we are all to some degree spiritually inclined. We all know that there is more to life than what appears before us. Some subscribe to the words of the wise of the years past, while other choose to follow their own way, and others still grow fond of rejecting these notions for yet other beliefs. No matter. It is all perspective, derived from experience. Our mind in the brain is a connection machine, and we will associate all our perceptions with our beliefs in one way or another. We will love our gods, love ourselves, love the world, hate them all, whatever, but we will not be without the bond. Every religion, and I believe science will one day be considered one as well, attempts to describe the world and the human condition in a way that molds your perceptions if you allow, or at least to encourage them in various directions. Each has its own completely subjective merits that appeal to each person in a different way based. They are all paths that are not meant to literally guide you to someplace else, but rather to be companions to you, whispering comforting words in your ear, as you experience this inexplicable temporality called life.
Every being, every object, everything you can ever perceive and even that which you cannot, has as much or as little reason for being as you do yourself. What these things are and are not are unique to each of us, and so are but an extension of the self. How you see and what you see is a reflection of whats inside of you. You can try as hard as you might to alter the reflection, but if that change is really what you desire then you merely have to look into yourself and begin there.
What you see is what you are.