Watch people in any parking lot. They circle. They wait. They hunt for the spot closest to the door. To save, what, forty seconds?
Is this living?
We follow the path because that’s the path. No one really explains it. Go to school. Get a job. Drive to the store. Find the closest spot. Buy the birthday card because the words sound about right. Check the box. Move on.
We have built entire lives out of checked boxes, and somewhere along the way we stopped asking who designed the checklist.
I stood in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and felt almost nothing. The crowds, the building, the weight of being told this is the thing you’re supposed to feel something about. Meanwhile, outside, there is art everywhere. In the way someone dresses. In the way a city weathers. In the way people move and argue and love and grieve in public. We decided some art belongs behind glass with an admission fee and the rest doesn’t count. We just accepted that. The same way we accept what technology is doing to us, slowly and quietly, without much of a vote.
Siddhartha Gautama walked away from a palace because he saw suffering and couldn’t unsee it. The parallels between his time and ours are closer than we’d like to admit. We just have more distraction now. More noise between us and the questions we don’t want to sit with. The more we produce, the less we reflect. The more we defer to leaders, the quieter our own voice becomes.
None of us know our end date. We say we know this. We live as if tomorrow is guaranteed, as if there will always be more time to be present, more time to stop circling and just walk.
I don’t have answers. I think the point is the asking. The willingness to notice that we are drifting, and to ask honestly whether this is the current we want to be carried by.
The spot closest to the door is not saving you anything that matters.
I understand if this post makes no sense to many – it’s just my expression for the day.
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