On the Way to Somewhere
Today has been an off day. Not for any pernicious reason or whatnot, but because it just feels off. It feels like I’m on the Metro, being shuttled between moments, places, people, and time to somehow assemble a life out of the various components provided.
My youngest is off of school this week, and having attended some winter camp in the weekend preceding this (along with a short visit to her sister at university in PA), she’s now in my care. There have been some good conversations as well as some delicate tap-dancing around those issues that affect any in-the-middle-of-it teenage girls. We even managed to sneak in some practice driving in the empty parking lot of a public school nearby.
These are moments, Metro stops if you will, where you can jump off, catch a breath or ten, and then hop back on to whatever the destination ends up being. You get to observe the people around, heads down, rushing about with noses glued to cell phones, and hope they’re finding some meaningfulness from it all. It is, after all, a Friday and not the relaxed jaunt of a Saturday or Sunday in the big city.
Perhaps this is what was so brilliant about wandering Barcelona on a Sunday. There were, of course, faces glued to digital entertainment. Still, to a more significant extent, people were glued to the moments at hand, the pageantry and mystery of giant puppets snaking their way through the narrow alleys of people and stone. The discordant laughter, drums, and reed instruments all clashed with the general tumult of people’s expressions. It was a splendid racket that you rarely get to experience these days.
Beyond the puppets, you have the celebration of life that these parades inevitably are. They showcase how people of all nations, races, religions, genders, sexes, and abilities come together to celebrate, in their way, the cornerstone of what makes us human. We are social creatures, after all, prone to exchange our stories and narratives in an unwritten bartering for collective wisdom and experience.
Regardless of where these things happen, they’re beautiful, collective experiences that add another thread to life’s fabric. As you move about your weekend, taking in the sights, sounds, and soul of a nation, place, community, and people you call your own, don’t neglect the feeding of your soul in the big and small moments you come across. Imbibe in the delightful gaze of a snot-nosed child seeing their first heirloom tomato, laugh at the kismet of another family taking their kid to practice drive in the same parking lot you’re at with yours, revel in the ability to read stories from all over the world in the comfort of your own space. And remember, life is truly what you make of it, good times and bad.
May it ever be so.
