So apparently nature was just as emotionally disturbed as I was on my daily commute home from school. Traffic, if you didn’t know already, is just something that I cannot as a human being deal with. I am usually a laid back, happy-go-lucky person but stick me on the highway in a sea of break lights at 5mph and watch my sanity unravel. I begin to get irritated and break out into a proverbial sweat, so to speak, picking things out of my brain and running with them at full speed because I cannot literally move myself. Ideas froth and begin to expel themselves from the most disturbing places of my mind, accelerating until they snowball into completely out of control sentences. Sometimes I find amazement in my irritation and have those little enlightening light bulb moments, and other times I visualize myself idling along at 5mph (not even touching my gas pedal), jumping out of the turtle with 4 wheels encasing me, and running myself over in the most creative (if not disturbing) of ways.

Today was no different. I was stuck in traffic for a good twenty minutes of my life, my cell phone battery draining to nothing, leaving me to the eternity that is I-35 on a warm almost-summer day in Texas without A/C. I could feel myself getting antsy, despite the fact I had no where to be and was in no hurry to get home. My steering wheel seemed almost sympathetic as it shook violently in my hands, as if to mimic the turmoil inside of me slowly boiling to the tops of my ears. There was no music playing, only annoying weather and traffic reports telling me of the culprit of this swimming madness. On the OTHER side of the highway, there was a wreck blocking two of their lanes. THEIR LANES, not on my own side’s trouble-free wide open highway. There is nothing more irritating that nonsensical traffic via rubber-necking fools.

Beside myself, I began to reflect on my days learning. I chewed on some interesting Aristotelian and Heidegger ideas on being, that seemed to funnel my burning inner rage into more of an active criticism and re-evaluation of what it really means to “be” in this world (this is where I stand back and wonder if traffic is a mere nuisance , or Gods way of getting my creative juices flowing enough to pump out self-enlightened “ooohs” and “aaaahhs” about my own personal existence since the most interesting things I come up with happen to be a result of traffic or car rides home).

As I was contemplating “being” and the essence of what it the possibility of being entails, I was rudely and quite abruptly shaken from my thoughts from a mini-natural disaster of proportions that are entirely too ironic for me not to share. Out of no-where, on a bridge over the lake, loud thuds begin to hit my car breaking my collective silence; The inside of my car went from dead silence to what sounded like a down pour, to silence again. Half panicked in my surprise, I glanced around looking for the culprit, wondering which cloud’s bottom fell out. But it was not raining. Confused and slightly annoyed, I turned my attention to my windshield in search of something to tell me what had just happened and to my horror found a windshield of giant ker-splats. 22 in all, to be exact.

This event was both perplexing and exciting (though I want to stop here to say I do not condone the killing of innocent insects). Sparking my imagination, I wondered if nature was just as irritated as I with this traffic, turning new cogs and abandoning current thoughts. Was this world war three on my windshield, an opposition to me (as a human being) polluting the highway in my man-made nonsensical traffic? Was this a colony on my windshield, led by some sort of Charles-Manson insect, committing mass suicide together in a final farewell for their current state of being? Or was it murder? Did I kill an entire community of bugs who had every right to be there, in their own element of nature, with my cold hard steel framed tank of transportation? Somewhat morbidly obsessed with the idea of a dead zone on my windshield, I anthropomorphized the tiny beings that were no more and wondered what they were before they were the only think I ever knew them to be: exploding green goo.

When I finally was able to pull in front of the house and throw my tank into park, I had forgotten about the traffic that consumed such a short eternity of my life. Dare I admit that I counted the casualties before me, and even closer examined what it was that disturbed my thinking so? Bumble Bees. Poor, unsuspecting (or possibly suspecting- I have not yet made my mind up yet on whether it was accidental or full of purpose) bumbles whose lives I cut short because I was caught up in my thoughts while driving (not that I could avoided something I couldn’t see in the first place). The irony almost kills me when I think about it and makes me wonder if it wasn’t the universe’s way of saying LOL at my pathetic attempts to understand philosophically what it means to “be”.

I think that sometimes we get too caught up in our own little worlds to see the bigger one around us. I like to think that the universe is a fair and just place that allows us to look back at a given instance in time to revaluate and occasionally laugh at ourselves. I would also like to think that the universe laughs at us from time to time as well, as we swarm like busy little bees trying to progress AND understand the world as it is all around us. I have certainly taken my “being” for granted and have failed to examine exactly what it means for me to be, how I be, and why I be…something I am interested in learning more about. And while trying to unravel these mysteries, the material world around me showed its humor. While unraveling “being” mentally, I was “beeing” physically- an irony that I wish you could fully understand and laugh as deeply as I did.

The universe is a beautiful place. And today, it taught me a philosophy that you cannot learn in books.




Unknown "Lovely Druid" Purring - 16 years, 11 days ago