Repeated Passages


Every weekday I travel thirteen miles to work and thirteen miles back home again. I’ve done it hundreds of times. I hope I’ll do it hundreds more. It’s a bus journey that takes thirty minutes each way. It starts at the bus station in my small hometown, goes through the countryside, and ends at the bus station in the city center. 

Making the same passage so often could easily become boring. Routine lays down a crust of familiarity under which the electricity of experience can lose its brightness. Getting used to things inoculates us, makes us immune to noticing their nature. The process of becoming accustomed generates its own fine silt, an invisible dust that clogs the senses. It’s easy to become stale with repetition, to allow the keen edge of what we encounter to get blunted; to let things lose their bite and luster. 

In an effort to resist this drift into dullness, to try to keep looking and noticing what’s there, to keep in sight the extraordinary dimensions that are threaded through the apparently ordinary, I resolved a year ago to write a series of short essayistic reflections about my daily journeys. This is one of them. 

Sometimes I start with something I’ve noticed about my fellow passengers--an expression on a woman’s face, an overheard fragment of conversation, the fleshy whorls of someone’s ear, the scent of patchouli. Sometimes it’s an object that sparks a beginning--a book that someone’s reading, a glove left on a seat, a leaf or feather on the floor. Or it could be something I notice outside as we drive past that acts as prompt--viburnum shrubs in bloom out of season, a derelict building, two foxes racing across a field. But sometimes, as in this case, an essay begins not from anything another person could detect, but from the workings of my own imagination. 

                                                        

Occasionally, and I hope this won’t seem too macabre, I imagine everyone on the bus sitting with their skulls unzipped, revealing the pale, pulsating orbs of their brains, veined and nerve-threaded. The thoughts they’re thinking are let free to hover above them, made visible to an observer. If it was possible to peel back the armor of the flesh like this, without causing injury, to inject some tracking dye or radioactive tracer so that the pulse and shift of ideas could be followed, it’s astonishing to think what the bus would be filled with. I picture films playing out above each opened head, with every possible genre and director represented. It’s as if the bus’s thirteen-mile journey is accompanied by a flurry of invisible, inner journeys made by the psyche of each passenger as it paces the labyrinth of a personality’s unique convolutions.

What other people think, how they see the world, the way in which their sense of self and other is wired, what happens in the interiority of their consciousness, how they navigate safe passage through their days, remains inviolably private. It’s one of those mysteries that we routinely encounter. I can’t detail the imaginative inner life of the other passengers, but I’ve no reason to suppose it’s less intricate or colorful than mine. No doubt there will always be an amount of mundane enough things, the gentle hum of the quotidian, but I suspect that--if it could be observed--the thought-cargo of the bus would, overall, be stupendous rather than stale, suggestive of treasure rather than trivia.

One of the recurring motifs in my bus-based musings, a well-trodden imaginative path that I’ve followed on several of these repeated passages between home and work, involves speculating about how I, and the bus, and my fellow passengers might appear to people centuries from now. If it was possible to make such things visible, one thought-pattern that would sometimes be found playing above my head features archaeologists of the future probing our remains.

                                                             
  
I often start with Ötzi the Iceman. 

Ötzi was found in melting ice, in the Ötzal Alps--thus his nickname--in 1991. This chance discovery, near the Austrian/Italian border, was at first thought to be the body of a climber missing after a recent avalanche. In fact, it turned out to be a 5,000-year-old naturally preserved corpse. It has been of enormous archaeological interest. 

Imagine the bus being suddenly entombed by some natural calamity and lost for millennia. Then, like Ötzi, it’s rediscovered at some point far in the future. What could be learned from our bodily remains, from the vehicle we were traveling in, the clothes we were wearing, the artifacts we carried in our bags and pockets? Imagining this scenario, picturing us miraculously preserved, I reckon that 5,000 years from now the bus would become as precious as a jeweled sarcophagus. Its contents would metamorphose out of their ordinariness and be treated as remnants of a vanished civilization. The sheer ancientness of the bodies and their accompanying materials would bestow revelatory potential on what we dismiss as commonplace. 

What might people thousands of years from now conclude from the evidence of these remains? And what can we learn about our world and the passages we follow through it from thinking about that question?

                                                            

No one can imagine the future with any confidence. I know my picture of the bus becoming a focus of intense archaeological interest five millennia hence is as fanciful as the notion of its sudden entombment and preservation. But for all its unlikelihood, it’s a picture that often preoccupies me when I’m traveling these thirteen miles. In part, this is just the mind at play. But it also provides an interesting perspective from which to view the present.

History is as easily sloughed off the things that bear witness to its passing as the scales rub off a butterfly’s wings. Even those objects that are dramatically entangled with what happened tend to reach us purged of any trace of the specifics of their involvement. So, for example, if we hold a World War I bayonet in our hands, we’re helpless to establish beyond the uncertainty of conjecture the precise part it played in that conflict. It might have been made at the end of hostilities and never have been used in battle. It might have been the means by which a score of lives were violently ended. Perhaps it’s just as well we can’t read from touch alone the history of the things we handle. If we could, think of the laments and frenzied cries that might issue from something like a bayonet. Who knows the agonies it caused, or what emotions its wielder felt as they used it--horror, fury, exhilaration, guilt, remorse? But unless something comes to us already documented, we can’t directly listen to the story that it’s part of.  

Yet sometimes I wonder if what happens really does evaporate from the materials through which it’s mediated as quickly and completely as it seems to. Perhaps things have inscribed upon their deep structure, at an atomic level, invisibly tattooed into the particles of their fundamental core, an indelible record of the trajectories they’ve followed, the roles they’ve played in our life-passages. Perhaps by the year 7022, humans will have learned how to access these automatic logbooks written into quarks and protons and electrons; they’ll be able to read their meticulous transcriptions of the histories they’ve witnessed. For them, the Braille of the world’s substance will sing and speak and howl as they brush their questing fingers over it.

                                                        

In the aseptic conditions of an imagined lab in that far future, objects for examination are carefully laid out on white-topped, spot-lit benches. Clustered around them, using a variety of devices, are members of the research team formed to investigate this fantastic cache of material, the most important archaeological find of the age. What will be of most interest to these archaeologists of the future?  Will it be the design and fabric of our clothes? What the crudities of our dental work tell them about oral health in the 21st century? The tattoos on our bodies, the jewelry we wear, or what they can retrieve from the data stored on our phones and laptops? Will they be shocked by the environmental disregard suggested by the bus’s engine? Or will they be puzzled, having reconstructed the faded headlines of our newspapers, by our seeming indifference to reading about other people’s suffering?   

Maybe by 7022 technologies will have been developed that can scan the mummified flesh of our corporeal remains and reconstruct from its folds and wrinkles the story of our lives. Maybe such advances will have happened as to render psychometry a reality, so that objects reveal their history directly to touch, though touch that’s augmented by such an array of sophisticated sensors as to be a quantum leap beyond our comprehension. By 7022, archaeologists may be able to take any of the artifacts found with the bodies on the bus--pens, combs, wallets, earrings, watches--and make them speak, reconstruct the stories they’re a part of.  Perhaps their technology will enable the archaeologists to listen to our ancient bones as if they were instruments playing back the music of the bodies they once supported.

Or, just as likely, the preserved bus might be found by a ragged band of nomads struggling to survive in a post-nuclear wasteland. It would be looted for whatever practically useful material it yields. The preserved flesh of the passengers’ corpses would be boiled and eaten, the cooking fire fed by upholstery torn from the seats and ancient books and documents carried in bags and briefcases.

                                                          

Rather than seeing my ancient flesh consumed by a tribe reduced to cannibalism by previous ages’ folly, I prefer to think of it being carefully dissected by some 71st Century archaeologist who’s eager to uncover the secrets it contains. With Ötzi the Iceman in mind, I picture my yellowed corpse laid out for examination, an ordinary body turned into something fantastic by the sheer span of time that it encompasses. My imagination conjures Aneela--slim, dark-eyed, with gentle hands--a young researcher of great promise. Will she be straightforwardly human in a sense I’d understand? Or might she be closer to being a kind of bionic hybrid, her native flesh fused with a scaffolding of electronic and biological prostheses whose addition confers what to my eyes would seem like superhuman powers?  

Whoever/whatever she is, Aneela has been assigned Body 15W. They tag us with the number of the seat in which we were found, “A” for aisle, “W” for window.  What will she feel as she probes into the desiccated canals that used to flow and thrum with all the transactions of my biological cargoes, the imports and exports that sustained me, that were me? Will she wonder what kind of person I was, imagine a personality for me, puzzle over what my beliefs might have been, what my hopes and fears were, how I navigated my passage through life in the time I was allotted?

Faced with human remains from so long ago that they’ve shaken off any trace of the gruesome, become free of any taint of decomposition, moved beyond the shadow of bereavement, it would surely be natural to wonder about the personality who once animated this body, and for the mind to range over a catalogue of images, skimming through numerous hypothetical scenarios into which the vanished person might be fitted. I know I do this in museums. If I’m looking, say, at the bones retrieved from a Stone Age burial, I always speculate about the nature of the person whose flesh they once supported--what they looked like, what their name was, who their friends were, the beliefs they held, the things they cherished, who they loved, the last thought that crossed their mind before death claimed them.  

I imagine Aneela doing the same for me.  

Would her 71st century know-how be able to reconstruct my facial features from the shriveled mask that’s left? Could my voice be resurrected, made to sound again, by a painstaking 3D mapping of the mouth, the tongue, the larynx? If such reconstruction was possible, what would my voice say? Could it really speak like me, even for me?  Studying a simulation of me moving on a screen, a facsimile so exact that if I could glimpse it I’d imagine I’d been filmed, will she wonder about the original of this simulacrum, his likes and dislikes, what he held dear, his understanding of the world (how different would it be from hers?). When she scans and photographs, takes samples for analysis, will the keyboard of her imagination chance on any notes or themes that in fact ring so exactly true I’d recognize them as ones my life once hummed along to? Or will her imagined version of me be so out of tune with the person that I was that I’d not recognize it at all?  

                                                           

As she cuts into my ear, probes its leathery cavities for clues, what will she conclude? Will a 71st century ear hear completely different sounds from the ones that actually poured into my ears on the repeated passages of these bus journeys? Will there still be a common catechism of elemental human music--a baby crying, laughter, shouting, someone talking in their sleep, the sound of argument, and companionable conversation, or will everything have changed? Will Aneela’s sense of meaning’s melodies be tuned so differently to mine that our outlooks would be mutually incomprehensible? What language will she speak? Will English still survive in some form that I’d recognize? How much of it could I understand?

As her examination of my corpse moves from head, arms, and abdomen to belly, pubis, groin, will she pause, momentarily halted by a sense of trespass that still flags up a worry about violation even centuries after the intimacies of love and lust are vanished? As Aneela probes the sunken scrotum, the withered penis lying flaccidly against it, will she speculate about my sex life, wonder if I had children--if, conceivably, any of my descendants might still be alive conterminously with her? Might these testicles that open dryly to her incisions once have contained in their evaporated reservoirs the seed of a bloodline that isn’t yet extinguished but still, somewhere in the world, follows life’s intricate, incredible passages?

What stories will my hands and feet reveal? Will chemical analysis of bone and nail and gut uncover information about diet and disease not known before? Will the light of learning in that far distant century be so bright that from the bodies on the bus archaeologists will be able to piece together a detailed map of who we distant forbears were, what we were like, what moved us, what made us us?

Imagining being laid out for dissection in the far future makes me think about how our unaided senses reveal such a minuscule fraction of the world. Consider what a wealth of things is cloaked by the customary surfaces we’re used to; how our sight is blind to the complex intricacies that underlie things. The forms that usually capture our attention are like mesmerizing simplifications. Beneath them lie hidden worlds. Think of what a microscopic examination of the bus would bring to light; think of what the driver’s hands would reveal if subjected to the scrutiny of an electron microscope.

                                                          

I’m not sure why, but I often find myself thinking in terms of geological time when we pass the only gas station on the bus’s route. It’s unremarkable enough, built according to the replicated anonymity expected of such places. Sited in a tarred nook of land just after a busy junction, it’s sheltered by a semi-circle of tightly packed evergreen trees that must have been planted to provide a windbreak. The pumps, the forecourt, and the shop create an ensemble that looks like a thousand others scattered across the world. It could be almost anywhere. The garish neon-lit colors of the brand liveries show up brightly, even in daylight, in part because they’re accentuated by the dark backdrop of the conifers.

In the way that there are sometimes speed-bumps--ramps, sleeping policemen, they go by different names--to slow the pace of traffic outside schools or coming into residential areas, I’ve come to think there must be invisible time-bumps laid across the road outside the gas station. This might account for why I so often feel my sense of time jolted into a different gear whenever the bus passes it.  

That happens today, as I’m thinking about Aneela. Looking at the nook now occupied by the gas station I switch from archaeologists of the future to wondering about what was here ten thousand or ten million years ago, and what will be here ten thousand or ten million years into the future.  

If some automated witness with the durability of diamond could be anchored to this spot and set to record everything that happened, happens, and will happen in these environs from the start of time until its end, what story would such a time-buoy tell? And what minuscule part would the buses driving past it constitute, as they bear me and the other passengers to our destinations day after day on these repeated passages?  We are such recent actors in the scheme of things; the roles we play are vanishingly minuscule against the scale of time’s duration. 

Blink and we are gone.

                                                         

When Aneela and her team have done their work, what ethical code will be in place to govern the disposal of our gutted and gleaned cadavers? Will we be kept cached for future researchers to sign out like ancient volumes in a library? Or will we be put on public display? Will there be museums in the 71st century? Or will our corpses be interred or burnt according to whatever customs they suppose we might have followed for the disposal of the dead? Perhaps they’ll have their own strict guidelines for what is spiritually appropriate, environmentally sound, and publically acceptable. Every human society has its own rituals for marking the end of life’s passage.

Will Aneela believe that all I was is contained in the yellowed corpse laid out upon her white-topped slab? Or will she harbor somewhere in her heart that old persistent notion that some essential spirit exists independently of the body, that it somehow survives our physical dissolution? How will the 71st Century view the idea of a soul? Will anyone at that point in time credit the idea of a deity?  Will such beliefs be viewed with ridicule or reverence, as viable options or as primitive superstitions?

For all that I’d wish rationality and good sense, sound education and scientific thinking to triumph in our species’ future--for bones to be viewed as no more than whatever it is they really are. Nonetheless, a part of me succumbs to a picture of Aneela in somber ceremonial costume performing a ritual in the disposal of Body 15W.  She kneels, lays a flower, her lips move in some silent incantation, prayer--though addressed to what or whom I have no idea--as she thinks of the person whose body she has so exhaustively explored and harvested, plundered for all the information it contains. And in some realm of the impossible, I imagine a still not extinguished part of me feeling a glow of satisfaction being kindled by the reverence she shows.

                                                        

All of this is easily dismissed as daydream--something idly conjured by the imagination as it sits confined for the duration of a thirteen-mile bus journey. I’m not suggesting that credence is given to any of these far-fetched eventualities. My description of them is offered simply as one small example of the thought-cargo carried by the bus.  

My thinking in this key, on this subject, in this direction is a reflection of my continuing curiosity about these frequently made journeys. Forget about the sudden entombment and preservation, forget about the chance rediscovery after centuries, rendering the bus into a cache of wonders. There is much to wonder at in the here and now of each day’s journey. One of the lessons of my commute has been the way in which completely everyday things closely abut with mysteries; how the mundane is intertwined with the miraculous, the ordinary with the extraordinary, how these repeated passages from home to work and back again hold far more in them than is suggested by the dullness of thinking of them merely as “my commute.”  

Sometimes the bus seems like a kind of tunneling device, its journeys boring further and further into the substance of existence, allowing me to take core samples from deep within. It offers in its collection of daily oddments a selection of biopsies for analysis. The journeys themselves take on the guise of diagnostic explorations that investigate the body of being via the spoor that’s left in whatever my attention is drawn to. I know that buses traveled this route long before I was born, and that they’ll do so long after my death. Not being here, not being part of life’s lit up threads of movement, occupies billions of years. Between the enormities of duration passed in time being unborn and time being dead, our moments of transitory sentience are truly fleeting. That fact alone should render every moment into something astonishing, each bus trip into something precious.  

                                                       

I sometimes wonder what sort of group it would be if everyone who has traveled on the bus over the course of a day, a week, or a month was gathered together. What would such a composite body of people look like? How many members would it have?  How would it divide in terms of age and gender, nationality and profession? And what if I radically widened this catchment so that it took in everyone who has ever been a bus passenger over these thirteen miles, over all the years in which this route has been operated? What would be the size and composition of this complete tribe of travelers? Or, moving in the opposite direction of inclusion, what kind of sub-group would be delineated if it was defined by the number of people who’ve listened to the same piece of music on the bus, or have read the same book whilst traveling, or if the parameters were drawn so as only to take in, say, those who’ve been in Paris not more than a week before they boarded the bus, or those passengers whose favorite flower is fuchsia, or who’ve had sex less than an hour before buying their ticket, or who’ll be dead before the bus travels another hundred miles?

How many embryonic humans has the bus carried, and how many of these unborn babies will, in the years to come, travel in the bus themselves? Will any sit in the exact same places as their mothers sat? Will there be any who will sit there pregnant themselves, the embryo within them hidden from the view of other passengers as they were themselves once hidden in their mothers’ wombs?

Why do I think about these different ways of dividing and shepherding the passengers together? In part it’s just a game, an opportunity to obey the pleasing imperative to speculate. But I think it’s also a kind of shuffling and reshuffling of the deck of what’s there in order to see what might be suggested by new arrangements, new combinations. In my efforts to stay alert, to pay attention, to understand the nature of these repeated passages from home to work and back again, I take one of their major features--people--and cast them into varied alignments. Laying them out in unexpected groupings may suggest new angles, fresh perspectives, so that the mind may gain some additional purchase as it looks for threads of sense out of which the fabric of understanding might be further woven.

This imaginary manipulation of passengers into different constituencies from the one they naturally fall into (i.e. those who happen to be on the bus on any given journey) makes me think of divination and the I-Ching, a searching for meaningful patterns.  I cast the yarrow stalks of my fellow passengers repeatedly and search in the hexagrams for clues about the wider import of this journey that we’re all embarked on. 
 
The daily flow of passengers could be sluiced and dammed and channeled by all sorts of irrigating questions. People could be clustered according to whether they had a happy or unhappy childhood, a division could be made between the musical and unmusical, those who read poetry and those who don’t, those who’ll die as good a death as could be hoped for, content in the knowledge of a life well lived, and those who’ll die plagued with terror and regret. How many in the tribe of passengers believe in God? Which of them feels that life has a purpose beyond that dictated by the blunt imperatives that make us seek food, shelter, and companionship? Who are the five happiest people ever to have traveled this route? What conversation might they strike up with the five most miserable? It’s possible to shuffle and cut the deck of passengers in countless different ways. Running through them, looking at the patterns they suggest, I’m struck by the poignant loneliness of our existence, the unassailable secrecies of our solitariness.

It’s diverting to play with the patterns suggested by different ways of categorizing people. But in all the groupings that I put them into, all the imagined channels dug to let differences and similarities gather together into little reservoirs, it’s the selfsame water of humanity that flows and pools, repeating the same catechism of questions.

Where should we look for answers?

                                                            

Traveling these thirteen miles so often can make it feel as if the journeys are trying to teach me something, that they’re lessons in a curriculum I need to learn. Sometimes their repetition seems almost punitive, like lines given out at school, reminding me of my inattention, my failure to grasp things. For my obtuseness I have to write out--pace out--a hundred times and more the instruction to understand this bus journey, to see it as it is. Yet still I’ve not plumbed its mystery. Or, if not exactly punitive, the process seems similar to rote learning for plodders--the effort to hammer home a key point, hoping to drill it into a dull student’s brain by going over it again and again. So, the nature of my daily passages is repeated. Yet despite lesson after lesson, I still don’t understand it much more than I did the first time I made this journey. I must be missing something, or maybe the point at issue is simply too difficult for me to grasp and I’ll never understand it. 

Of course the journeys are neither punishment nor pedagogy, I know that really.  There’s no one designing a curriculum or attempting to teach me. It’s not as if the daily bus commutes are a series of equations that I have to solve, or passages of text with questions at the end to test my comprehension. I’m not being made to memorize them or repeat them as a penalty for some infraction. Yet, for all that, I sometimes can’t shake off this feeling that the repetitions are emphasizing something I’ve not yet properly appreciated, that these repeated passages are sounding out numerous variations on a theme I’m proving deaf to; that, stupidly, I’ve not yet managed to pick out a key leitmotif of harmony from the white noise that surrounds it and, until I do, the penalty of going over the same ground again will continue. 

One lesson that I have learned from the pulses of departure, arrival, and transit that characterize these journeys is that not being here, not being part of life’s movement--being unborn or dead--occupies an immensity of years. Our moments of existence look absurdly minuscule beside time’s dwarfing amplitude. Life’s onward journey, like its journey to this point, is completely independent of me. My presence--like that of any individual--is something transient, accidental, unnecessary. Such a realization is at once comforting and chilling. It contains an odd mixture of terror and truism. Maybe the inevitability of our absence and its eons-long continuance dulls the anxiety that attends it. Or maybe not. Sometimes I wonder why all the passengers aren’t screaming.

                                                              

As I sit musing on the bus, I often wonder where a thought begins and ends. Does it make sense to view a thought in the singular, as if it’s a discrete and separate unit, such that thoughts occur one after the other in neat, identifiable isolation--appearing seriatim in the kind of impermeable closed bubbles pictured above the heads of cartoon characters? Or are they integral parts of an always changing yet somehow constant continuum, part of a flow that’s the unique watermark of individual consciousness?  

Can we map the mind and heart and pinpoint where thoughts come from, where they go to, and how long they take to complete their passage through us? With my musings about Aneela and other archaeologists of the future, how many thoughts are involved, one or a whole varied constellation? When does one thought become another? How do different thoughts relate and connect to each other?

Could the number of thoughts that have occurred on this bus be counted, could their unfolding, development and interaction be tracked? And included amongst this inventory of thoughts--the manifest of ideas that has been part of the invisible cargo carried by this vehicle--are there any that break through the surface of perception, tap into strata of meaning that are richer than those we usually mine? Do any offer glimpses of who and where we really are, of where we’ve come from, where we’re going on our passage through the time allotted to us?

                                                        

People have traveled these thirteen miles for hundreds of years. Unless some catastrophe intervenes, they’ll continue to do so for centuries to come. The road links two long-established centers of human habitation; there will always be commerce between them. Given how long it’s been traveled, the road is like a kind of age-line marked on the face of the landscape. If its thirteen miles could be wrenched out of the ground it’s bedded into and cracked like a giant whip to summon back everyone who’s traveled along it, who would appear? Imagine what a multitude of stories have been/will be clustered along this one short fiber drawn from the world-hive, a section of exposed nerve cut from where it runs through the centuries, across these particular contours. It’s one of countless road-nerves that vein the planet with our pathways, each one freighted with its swarms of human transit. Yet, for all the purposeful bustle of our comings and goings, our keeping to timetables and deadlines, how strong is our sense of where we’ve come from, where we’re going? Sometimes on the bus, the modest scale of my journey notwithstanding--the fact that I never leave familiar environs--I feel overwhelmed by a kind of disorientating lostness at the mystery of our human passage.

Despite being small-scale, made familiar by frequent repetition, and each of only half-an-hour’s duration, these commutes-by-bus are still journeys. Cumulatively, they add up to a trek that already amounts to over six thousand miles. It’s likely to cover ten times that distance by the end of my working life. For all their slavish keeping to routine, my bus trips are steeped in the dyes of departure, transit and arrival. This means that every time I travel, something of these elements leach out and into mind.  The rhythms that are tapped out repeatedly in these journeys act as a kind of subliminal Morse, coding into my awareness a refrain that whispers a few repeated notes. The ear is bathed in the saturate of passage--setting off, moving towards a destination and arrival.  It’s an odd mix of lullaby and wake-up call. The familiar passing sights at once soothe with their known forms and disturb with the strangeness of seeing them pass by and disappear, the process of transit kindling somewhere in mind the knowledge that, at some point, I’ll never see them again. Like all journeys, this episodic one will end; one of its thirteen-mile segments will be the last one that I ever make. If you stop to listen, there are echoes in any journey of the mortal path we tread. 

For all their lack of anything obviously dramatic or exciting, the repeated passages of my daily commute possess a resonance that makes me think about journeying in broader terms – the fact that we’re all embarked on a journey, that life’s voyage had an origin and its progress takes us to an end. Yet I fear the dulling of this realization. By the time I leave my job, will I have grown so used to this commute that the skin of familiarity will have thickened, hardened, to the extent that I can’t see through it anymore? Will my resolve to pay attention become abraded by repetition, until eventually it’s defeated? After another five or ten or fifteen years, thousands of miles added to my cumulative trek, will the repeated passages of these daily journeys become so armored by the sheer number of times I’ve made them that they’ll slip into invisibility?  

What’s astonishing sits close-quartered with the ordinary, what seems commonplace at first glance soon reveals itself as extraordinary. These are truths I try to remember each time I’m on the bus. But as I make my two thousandth, three thousandth journey, will such realization dim?  Will I be lulled into the sleep of routine, become addicted to the narcotic of not noticing? Words can act like scalpels, blades whose thrust and cut can slice away the thick skin that grows around what happens and clads it in the scab of the accustomed, but how sharp an edge can words maintain over a period of years?  

I know I’ll fight against allowing these thirteen miles to become a hamster-wheel experience, a treadmill of tedium. I want to keep on observing, imagining, thinking. To that end, I’m determined to continue writing these essayistic reflections. This may lead to more questions than answers, more loose ends than tightly tied knots of explanation, it may foster more of a sense of unnerving strangeness than any feeling of security with what’s familiar. Nonetheless, it strikes me as a preferable approach to living. It’s impossible, I know, to predict whether, a decade down the line, I’ll still notice--still marvel at--the wonders each day offers. All I can do is to keep on trying to keep trying.

Chris Arthur is an Irish writer currently based in Scotland. He’s author of several essay collections, most recently Hidden Cargoes (2022). His work has appeared in various journals and been included in The Best American Essays. Further information about his writing, awards etc. can be found here: 
                                                                                     www.chrisarthur.org