The World is Transparent
You were in a rush to yoga or so I told myself. In the left lane, admittedly the passing lane, I sat comfortably going two miles over the speed limit, where you were on my ass. I couldn’t see the front of your car. That’s how I determine you’re on my ass. I was taking a left up ahead, just as you were—both of us headed in the same direction. As we turned, you were not only on my ass, you were up it. Your hair was in a bun, no sunglasses. Me, hat and sunglasses, hiding from buns with no sunglasses. At the stop sign, I turned. You went straight and then left to yoga, or so I told myself. Maybe you were teaching or just a few minutes late. Perhaps you had just had a double espresso, cortisol and adrenaline circulating heavily, cerebral blood flow decreased and the reason you were up my ass. I can’t know but it’s the story I tell myself so I can sit comfortably in passing lanes. I’m the driver everyone hates. I know I should be in the middle lane but there’s a left coming up soon that I’ll eventually have to take. She may have told herself that I was having a pleasant morning, which might account for my lack of urgency. The morning had been pleasant.
Is the mind both the perception of experience and the actual experience as it is, something like an unidentifiable shoreline: part sand, part rising and falling waves? And if so, is the purpose of existence to get out behind subjective perception to objective experience? Jean Varda, collage artist and relative of Agnès Varda, says, “To the eye that is pure, the world is transparent.” In other words, most of us operate from that space behind the eyes, filtered by past experiences, judgements, insecurities, and anxiety about the future where our personal stories are at least half lies.
Uncertainty or even a sense of certainty about the future comes along with hopes and beliefs about the possibility of future states. The most exhausting of experiences is not the actual doing of things but rather, the thinking of doing things before you’ve done them, especially while you’re doing something. When I must clean the house, I am not, despite all of the Zen training, present when I am sweeping or mopping. I am thinking of the next ten steps or even my next coffee. Had I been a chess player, I may have benefitted from such future planning. I am not a chess player though (more of a Go Fish player) so all of my planning is experienced in the moment as the little man behind the eyes, with ever-expanding expectations and therefore outcomes, is lost in thought about a future that, technically speaking, never really arrives.
Lost in thought, that timeline of our life that exists in the mind is, like our yoga teacher in a rush, entirely made up of thought and will never again exist or come to be. It’s really only ever…now. Now it’s now. And now it’s now again. As Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda says (which I’ve still never seen), “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift...that's why they call it present.” That’s all we ever get. Just now.
Under the section “Causes,” in the Wikipedia entry for tailgating, it says, “There can be several reasons for tailgating.” Preventing cut ins, negligence, coercion, aerodynamics, and trailing are all established causes. Rushing to yoga, urgency its prerequisite, might fall under coercion, behavior that forces people like me out of the way so that I might decide to get the hell out of the left lane.
Can one become enlightened while on the road? It seems that driving among others is one of the better opportunities to learn how to respond rather than react. If you can respond from a place of empathy rather than from one’s own egotistical wanting, you might be a step ahead of most people or at least, one car length ahead. It seems that we all are trying to get our way to the very last breath. That’s all we ever want as individuals as long as we think of ourselves only as individuals: we want what we want without thinking what we want might affect those around us. Why should we? If you can determine the possibility that other humans have an entire universe behind their eyes with errands, grocery lists, and yoga classes, you can at least keep traffic moving. I’m not so brave. I sit in passing lanes where pickup trucks pile up behind me, never more indignant than when I am on the road. My eye is not pure, my world opaque.
