Usually, after a day at work, I will tend to fall asleep on the subway. It is a terrible habit, but sometimes long days and then classes after work will do that. It is sometimes a wonderful experience to settle into the scene of the subway and finally let the items of the day disperse. Sometimes I might have a great many things in mind, but the restful moment seems to resolve these thoughts. It says to me: maybe you had that thought, but it was only the stirrings of restless mind. Rest dissolves the need to embellish those thoughts. And an ideal rest is the one that is alert to all the elements.
Today, I saw a couple sitting on the subway seats. The lady was just resting her head on the man's shoulder, and her eyes were gently closed. The man appeared to be gazing out the window, while trying to balance the lady's leaning head with his collapsing shoulder. He didn't look like he was succeeding, but he still looked peaceful. And I jokingly referred to this scene as ''tired romance". It isn't meant to disparage the scene, only to show that sometimes being tired can be romantic. It suggests a natural commonality between people, and their willingness to be silent with each other.
I have to admit, it's not easy for me to find the silence in things. The mind needs to be either sufficiently calm or subdued to be able to find examples of this kind of beautiful silence of just being.
When I am very silent, I see that things are just okay and things fit together the way they are. I don't need to force anything together like a jigsaw puzzle. In a sense, there are so many examples even in the nature world of things coming together. Lewis Thomas writes in his book Medusa and the Snail: "no Darwin has yet emerged to take account of the orderly, coordinated growth and differentiation of the whole astounding system, much less its seemingly permanent survival. It makes an interesting problem: how do mechanisms that seem to be governed entirely by chance and randomness bring into existence new species which fit so neatly and precisely, and usefully, as though they were the cells of an organism?" (p.13)
Why this impacts me is that it reminds me not to push too hard to connect. Sometimes, it is just a matter of putting myself into the world and making myself more available to what happens around me. Other times, I just naturally see that things fall into each other in patterns and then fall out of them, as a natural rhythm or process. Even destruction of elements is part of a natural order, not a reason to blame or feel one is being punished or left behind. It is part of an ongoing cycle that is renewing itself all the time.
It is often quite hard to think or experience life in this way, because so much of social learning is about trying to master new skills and reach goals. But I think the 'hard' part is only the very complicated impressions I have as to what I need to do, to be or feel in order to survive in the world. There just isn't space to observe that the goal is only one possibility among many others. But even if I were to have no real status in the world, I would still be connected to other beings in some way. It is a journey to figure out those ways of connection that often remain hidden in the corner, like flies on the wall.
Thomas, Lewis, (1974) Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher. Toronto: Bantam Books
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