I was in my car this morning, dropping off various members of the household at bus stops, meeting points, near schools - all very ordinary.
This is a common activity for me. I work a 0.5 contract (usually 1.1 of a week though - that's another story) which means that two mornings a week I am not heading in to my office. I'm dropping people off, then heading home, to work from home and deal with such weighty matters as laundry and watering orchids. Sometimes I even do shopping...
As I returned home, I noticed the people on the bridge, walking across, a man in a hat, a girl in school uniform, a woman rooting in her handbag.
I've been thinking a lot about the human experience lately, and I saw these people as individual human instances, living people experiencing their individual universes.
I drove on past the bus stops, round the roundabouts, people waiting and driving and being driven, each experiencing that moment uniquely, probably mostly unthinking, of just standing, or of being pushed by the turning motion of a car, or being lost in the flow of needing a thing that must be somewhere in the handbag.
What were their experiences of that moment? I doubt any of them remember it so much.
What happens to that experience, what happens to the lost signals that we process and discard?
The people, all of them, living in that moment, had a flow of experiences that were all commonplace and unnoticeable. It's all things they'd done before, and there was nothing remarkable, just the ordinary world, just living.
I wondered what we miss, all the time, what things that would have once been fascinating and new and are now commonplace - from simply being able to stand, to the delicious anticipation which we do not experience when waiting for a bus to appear around a corner, to the frisson of doubt about the phone that might still be in the kitchen or might be in this bag somewhere beneath the biros and nail files.
So many things, all the time, so much passes us by, and we all carry on with our lives focussing on the mundane and completely understood.
Meanwhile, the torrent of experience pours past us, filtered out, abandoned and lost.
Of course that's a necessity; we can't process it all, and the processing of it is an experience in itself. We can't keep up, we can't even begin to, and there's a tragedy in that, of all the missed life.
Perhaps we miss something more important though - that we change, slowly and inevitably, that we become new people, and yet we continue to ignore the things the old us was used to.
We focus on the things our old selves trained us to think are important, and those voices that answer the standard questions (what do you do? are you OK?) are old voices giving old answers that may have been right once, may have been thought through once but are too rarely scrutinised, and are not the answers of the people we become.
Were the people on the bridge happy? Nobody was weeping. Perhaps that's what we settle for, in the end. The easy path, the familiar, not weeping.
For my part, my experience of that moment was of a connection to the people, and there was something joyous and loving and I was glad to see them, bustling and not weeping.
So much so, I decided to write about it.
