InspirationLisa Jones
Where we think we're going I'm not sure -- from home to work
and back again until it's all a monotonous blur. I drive almost
three hours a day -- 350 miles per week -- and I feel stagnant and
overextended at the same time. Is this good or bad? I try not to
judge.In the morning, I take Laurel Canyon Boulevard as my teacher. I wind through the canyon from West Hollywood to Studio City and it teaches me compassion for the many people who never had the privilege of learning how to drive. Why am I always behind a slow person? I hum daimoku at the automotively aggressive guy behind me who's mouthing dirty words. He thinks I'm going too slow.
Impatience can be a form of violence, and timid tentativeness won't do anyone any good -- two life lessons, courtesy of Laurel Canyon.
One morning, a truck driver came tearing down the canyon in the opposite direction. He hit a curve. A ladder flew off his truck and careened toward me. The ladder narrowly missed my car. I sensed the exquisite timing of the universe. Breathe and smile. Welcome my fellow students of the open road.
My workday commute is voluntary. I could find a job closer to home, or live closer to work, but I don't. So I have chosen my path, which is a spiritual path -- or so I like to think. There is some grand purpose to everything. So I like to think.
As with any spiritual path, I must trust that I'm always exactly where I need to be at exactly the right moment. I often need to be stuck on the Ventura Freeway around Sepulveda, very late for work. This is where I need to be to see that I'm terrified to relinquish my paycheck and stock options that dangle like fat carrots....or, more accurately, carrots that may be fat one day...when the stock price goes up...if the economy stays strong...when, if, maybe. Yet I'm terrified to stay another year which will turn into two years, which will turn into an entire lifetime of blah, not too happy, not too sad.
See how I project my fears into the future and assume the worst? This is wrongheaded, I know, but see how I do it anyway? Appalling.
I'm grateful for my job because, at the heart of it, I have not thought of anything better to do with my life.
Pain shoots across my lower back. I recognize the early twinges of sciatic catastrophe. Am I a hypocrite? "Go for your dreams," I say. "Follow your heart." Yet here I cling to the comforting stability of respectable employment while I defer my writing projects indefinitely. Can anyone understand what a misery this is to me? A more troubling question, and one that has haunted me longer: Why do I care what people understand or don't understand about me?
I sit in my car for hours and hours and hours, waiting for a sign or symbol, something to guide me to the next phase of my life. My car is the cocoon of my tiny existence, and I am a fleshy slug, waiting to become something new.
Recently, a total stranger in jackboots stomped on my BMW as if it were a shiny blue cockroach of conspicuous consumption. He kicked the windshield, spraying splinters of glass into the air-conditioning ducts for me to breathe later. I don't assume that this was an impersonal, random act of destruction. I know it has meaning. Maybe there is a lesson here about fear. Do hesitancy and fear attract victimization? I'm almost afraid to consider it.
The day after getting my car repaired, I was clocking eighty MPH up the Ventura Freeway near Agoura Hills. I heard a sound like a gunshot. A stray rock from a gravel truck cracked my brand new windshield. Ah, the absurd wonder of escalating maintenance costs.
Do you see what I'm getting at? Can you sense the futility and impending doom?
Eighty miles per hour may strike you as an excessive and unsafe rate of speed. It is. When traffic allows, we're all out there around Agoura Hills doing eighty in our cocoons. Then someone burns past us at eighty-five, ninety, and we think, "reckless idiot."
Driving to work has become a trip down a hall of funhouse mirrors -- everywhere I look, I can see myself reflected in unflattering ways.
One evening, I got on the Ventura Freeway going south, heading out of Thousand Oaks. There was a guy on a motorcycle, weaving through traffic, cutting in front of me, tearing along on his loud, smoking bike. Reckless idiot, yes -- but there was something especially reckless about him that prompted me to offer a prayer for his happiness. "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, idiot," were, I believe, my exact words.
As I crested a hill, traffic had slowed and cars were swerving past debris on the road. The car ahead of me did likewise and I saw, stretched out on the pavement, the body of the motorcycle guy. I stopped and others stopped. We were all sort of paralyzed, staring at his motionless body. Then he lifted his head. Unbelievable. He was alive! Cell phones lit up and people ran toward the guy. Someone covered him with a blanket. Blood soaked through it. Everyone wanted to help; no one knew what to do.
I stood about a yard away, chanting. I couldn't even hear myself, though, because the rush hour traffic was roaring all around us. I walked a few yards up the road and picked up the guy's jacket. It was heavy and strange, I remember thinking. Then I picked up his shoe. It was still warm and slightly damp. It felt like an intimate thing, carrying this guy's shoe. I placed his belongings on the pavement near him. The police had arrived, and the paramedics. I don't know what happened to him, whether he lived or died. I never heard.
Every time I drive over that hill -- each day of my insane, pointless commute -- I think of that guy. I offer a prayer for myself as much as for him. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, idiot. Where we think we're going, I don't know. There are signs, symbols, lessons, guidance everywhere I look. How can I be sure what they mean?
I think often of that guy's shoe. So maybe I should start with that. Something human, warm, humble. Something I can't really explain, but I can feel.