A friend commented recently “Everywhere we look nowadays, someone has intruded some advertising message – as often as not, full of carefully crafted deceit and manipulation”… “Specifically those little ads that get placed on roundabouts, a constant nagging ‘Look at me! Remember my name! Write down my phone number’, when you’re supposed to be watching the traffic or, if you’re in the passenger seat, you’re admiring the flowers and shrubs…”. I was minded to add “…or you’re on your bike, arguably ‘more-aware’ of your place in things and watching out for distracted drivers with encapsulated passengers… (trying not to be sucked in to the lycra-gofaster-nutritionbar cycling sub-culture… )”
As I cycled in this morning… drivers were pressing to “get past” and to “get there faster”… the majority of traffic follows the flow but a significant percentage just can’t get there fast enough. I encounter people either gripping the wheel and whipping the car to submission, or casually driving with abandon and carelessness ignorant of others’ position and need.
Drivers are not the only culprits, cyclists too sometimes just can’t wait, jumping lights or slaloming around pavements. Also pedestrians; dodge cars while crossing busy roads (with kids in tow) only yards from a crossing. Like the proverbial lemmings it seems only too easy to be sucked together towards the void…
“Not I” I hear you say? We’ll it took me a long while to wake up to a different reality. And it takes a regular refreshing to remind one of perspectives and attitudes that can so easily be warped by the constant nagging “look at me” etc.
A wise person once said “life’s not about finding yourself, but about creating yourself”.
I’d mould that to remind us that life’s not about getting somewhere, but can be about being.
Looking for something results in finding stuff.
Creating being, might result in being found?
Jules P Richards 