I'm in Orlando right now. It seems every interstate has a 55 miles per hour speed limit here. I drive the 55 mph, and I am consistently rushed upon from behind by my fellow drivers and then rushed around by these same drivers as they continue on their way, unless, of course, they choose to teach me a lesson by riding inches from my rear bumper at this speed, which means any sudden brakage by me and I will be involved in a life-threatening wreck.
I'm back home in Salt Lake City right now. It seems every interstate has a 65 miles per hour speed limit here. I drive the 65 mph, and I am consistently rushed upon from behind by my fellow drivers and then rushed around by these same drivers as they continue on their way, unless, of course, they choose to teach me a lesson by riding inches from my rear bumper at this speed, which means any sudden brakage by me and I will be involved in a life-threatening wreck. My children are nestled in the backseat oblivious to how close to death they sit in this moment. Yet, they soon find out as they are rushed away from their forms in the instant the speeding van collides into our small hatchback "trunk." At least they've now been schooled in the art of senseless brutality. Is it possible to cry yourself to sleep for the next 40 years of your life? Maybe I should contact the Guiness Book of World Records as I'm well on my way to reaching that milestone.
I am travelling on the Native American turnpike in Oklahoma on my way to Texas right now. It seems this road has an 80 miles per hour speed limit here. I drive the 80 mph, and I am consistently rushed upon from behind by my fellow drivers and then rushed around by these same drivers as they continue on their way, unless, of course, they choose to teach me a lesson by riding inches from my rear bumper at this speed, which means any sudden brakage by me and I will be involved in a life-threatening wreck. I take comfort as I breathe my last breath from this accident in the fact that I have learned my lesson: don't drive the speed limit in a world of unconsciousness.
I am at work right now and my fellow co-workers and human beings are fluttering about - to and fro - rushing to retrieve files, flying around cubicle corners on their ways to forgetting what they are on their ways to getting, typing themselves hurriedly into dark and eerie carpal tunnels. I walk in slow motion through the chaos around me, and I am summoned into the corporate courtroom office to be judged for my disloyalty to company priorities and fired for demonstrating a lack of ambition. I am told that, if I only looked around me more often and observed and mimicked and copied and imitated the fearful scrambling in circles exhibited by the best, most kiss-ass boss's bitches working for the company, I had the potential to be one of the superstars in the biz, the industry, the economic machine that powers the country. Now, the company founders turn their eyes away when they see my bearded form living vagrantly on the cold, winter streets of Utah.
I am waking up right now. There are a million things to accomplish this day and in the many days that are guaranteed to come, and I know that in order to even have the slightest chance to get it all done and experience the pleasurable relief of ending this struggle to survive just this day, then I have to speed through each moment unaware of all that the moment holds because it holds nothing that can alleviate my fears of being left behind by all of life. I wake my daughter, I give her an ulcer from pushing her quite literally in the middle of her back from one task to the next as she readies for school. I tell her to go potty, get her clothes on, eat breakfast - faster Faster FASTER! WE ARE OUT OF TIME! WE'RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL AND WORK! It's not possible that she's choking on her Cheerios right now as I rush to save her from entering into the quiet calm of the soul so that she can live and die longer in a mad world full of stark-raving lunatics running on their way to nowhere. For just a second, the most frightening idea I have ever had towers over my mind: perhaps it would be better for her to leave this all behind. Leave behind the incompetence of a father who cannot comprehend the damage he does each time he stressfully declares, "We've got to go, we're running behind!" Maybe I would have been better off had some such appropriate-to-the-situation fate befallen me when my own father was rushing me off to the next....
What? I'm not sure, but I am certain that if I don't get to whatever and whereever it is at the optimal speed possible, then I will not be worthy of whatever pleasure awaits me there. Ah, yes, I remember, it is the pleasure of having this anxious monkey pried off my back so that a larger, more ferocious gorilla can be sat upon me in its place as I scurry off under attack to the next destination that promises still fiercer demons of despair.
I am on vacation right now, but I must not take the time to stare at the sky or notice the sound of the smooth flow of the river down the mountainside as I walk up the mountainside because the goal is to get on top and then tumble back down so I can bumble determinedly to the next amusement part or even mountain and see less but do more in order to have more stories to tell more people who don't even care because they have their own adventures to fly through and past in the blink of an eye so that I can experience that I am someone who has a life.
Here I sit across from you at some restaurant, and I have absolutely nothing to say to you. Apparently, you too are at a loss for words, but I promise to you right now that my thoughts are moving at break-neck speeds, bumping and colliding into one another, debunking the debunkings of the debunked ideas of what I can say to you to make this frightening silence end. All these constructions of the racing mind tumble at the slightest wind of doubt expressed by the architect of such airy designs. Predictably, I die as you never call me again, and I search in futility for the boring self engulfed by your rejection. He is, after all, all I know.
Did you ever wonder what we are all rushing so fiercely toward? Then, my friend, that is a start. However, the further you explore this doubt in the intelligence of such a behavior, the more you find that it is a mistaken question. The question that allows you to receive real, enlightening answers is, "What are we all rushing so fiercly from?" For any momentary observation of it all clearly reveals that we are all rushing toward nothing except an illusion of relief from the current mental state that has us rushing. Thus, we have to dig deeper to the cause of the rushing to begin with. The cause is not getting to the meeting on time or knowing that one might miss his/her flight, or even that one must keep up with the Wilderses. Did you ever notice that you drive much too fast and scramble around much too frantically even when nothing in particular is going on, even when you do not have a "time-limit" on when you arrive or what you accomplish? You see, my friend, the cause of our collective rushing to the grave is never, ever any outside circumstance or event or situation.
Ralph Ellison said in his extraordinary novel, Invisible Man, "Keep this nigger boy running." The narrator of this book, who was haunted by dreams in which his grandfather gave him an endless succession of enveloped correspondence that opened to reveal this quotation, and one suspects Ellison himself, experienced firsthand the pain and suffering, the bumps, bruises, and breaks, the utter discombobulation that is inherent in this lifestyle so cherished by our culture. This nameless protagonist, in his earnestness, does not realize what a fool he makes of himself - not that others make of him by expecting him to live up to their expectations of him - until he stops this incessant running. We have all created fools of ourselves.
Yet, this is not a criticism or judgment. It is an observation of a man who has himself been the idiot puppet of the collective insanity of anxiety that is bred at birth into us all, and who is now, in each moment, making a conscious effort to "stop and smell the roses." Yet, before I could allow myself to do this, I had to challenge the greatest lie of my ego; I had to doubt that it was others (who did indeed teach me this very unnatural behavior) who were making me into a psychotic masterpiece of deceptive mind; I had to question the impulse to want to run into and through any driver who dared to drive too slow when I was late for whatever future happening that was clearly more important than their right to live; in short, I had to dare to be haunted by this profound question:
From what am I rushing so desperately?
Can you ask yourself this question the next time you find yourself in the midst of some speed-demon hell in which Life Itself is quite secondary to this incessant desire to get away from the present moment?
Of course you can.
The real question (we must always dig ever deeper for the real question) is
Will you?
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