Tick Tock

Tick tock. 

I stared at the watch strapped on my wrist to see how swiftly that second hand moves. I have been stuck in traffic for the last forty-five minutes. I glanced at the window, only to figure that home is still another twenty five minutes away from where I am.

It could have been just fifteen minutes if it were not for the slow-pace motion. Ah, traffic.

I lamented it. I regret every significant amount of time I put to waste whenever I get to spend the time in a halt, unproductively waiting for the long drive to end. All I was left was a moment to stare at the blank faces of those who are seated around me.

Intriguing. I wonder what thoughts are penetrated in their silence and stillness, while we are all caught up in an inescapable moment – there were nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

If a man is summoned to a state of waiting, of inactivity, how does the human mind work? Does it take all the activeness the body ought to do? What is then the instinctive thought that the mind ponders? Or is there such? If there is, is it relative?

Is it man’s natural intuition to continue thinking about what to do next when the stillness of the moment ends? Although the body has no choice but to rest during the waiting moments in a grocery cashier queue, at the taxi stand or inside a traffic jam, the mind never ceases to work. But what does the mind tell us during these moments?

This is what traffic has taught me. The irony.

Tick tock. I keep on staring at my watch every now and then.

Tick tock. We haven’t moved much.

I could not stand loafing - I do not own the world’s most outstanding forbearance. I feel that every minute is a chance to have done something. Something else, other than waiting. Seventy minutes, that is three hundred and fifty minutes in a working week. Do the math further. Imagine how much of my time have been squandered, thrown in a sea of uselessness, because the government has given less attention to what could have been the metro’s most basic yet most profound problem. The government. Ah, don’t even make me start.

Despised as I am, I figured there is just not much that I can do now. My eagerness to step away from that traffic has only led me to feel anguish, feeling stressed although my body has just been rested at the passenger’s seat for almost an hour now. Agitation grew, I continued to be vexed no longer just about wasting my time in the traffic, but so with the government, the cheap street lights the engineers decided to install and some other things that are just, trivial.

So I shrugged it off, I detached myself from that state. I was no longer concerned with what I needed to do, what I could have done or what else I wanted to. I didn’t care about the time.

I am surprised with how much lighter I felt.

I wanted to feel the moment with my body and mind radically present. I wanted to be part of that traffic scene where I have been disabled from the world’s mundane activities.

I stared again at their faces, they are calm. Though some of them share the agitation I have not been reluctant to emphasize, it astonished me that somehow, I am the only one who appears to have considered that moment cumbersome. Were they used to this? Have they no other activities to muster? Well maybe because the night has grown old and all they wanted was to get home.

Maybe not. Maybe I have just pre-occupied myself with my long list of self-proclaimed tasks. The time lost in traffic maybe inevitable, but there is something else I can do. Think.

It is in the silence of the moment albeit the chaos in the streets, that has told me it is not about the number of activities I have finished for the day. In the usual abode of life, others imply that self worth is measurable. What you have done accumulates to who you are, and perhaps what you are made of. The road has gotten to be an Olympic arena of goal-reaching, that of which I consider egocentric.

It gives us reassurance, every time we have done something lucrative. It bestows us with a personal affirmation that we are doing something right – a feeding of our self-worth. But it is the human nature to search for that affirmation. And by searching for that affirmation, we require time. The time to finish what we ought to do. But is that time worthwhile?

Tick tock.

Being trapped in that traffic made me feel that I have lost some of my time, as if spilling gold coins from a sack. Apparently, the time is still mine, and mine to use.

It is not about the amount of checkboxes I have marked on my list, not the number of hours I have enlisted in return of an overtime pay. Nor the seventy minutes I have wasted in that traffic jam. It is how I have spent my minutes, my hours, my day.

Within the twenty four hours of the day, eight of those I spent at work, two and a half of those I spend on the road. Do I get something genuinely valuable? Something that is priceless and timeless?

Have I thought about the people that are dear to me? Have I considered how they were for at least once in the seven days of a week? Have I been too busy minding my own world to realize that this world is but shared?

Was I too busy examining what the world does instead of what the world is?

At the very end of the day, was I pleased of what I have done? Or was it your superior? Have you fulfilled your own desires or was it what society expects from you?

Have you known much about the world around you? Have you even been to the world?

I have been too hustled minding life’s most buoyant activities - the common chores of my daily life, too occupied with what to do next after finishing the other. I forgot to chase not those which are tangible, but those that are born in spirit. Those I cannot touch.

Truth is, I never really lost a minute. I never even lost a second from it. It is just a matter of how I have spent those that I have, bargained it over the things that inhabit life’s superficial surfaces.

Being stuck in that traffic isn’t that bad after all. I knew what I have done before, and I know now what else I need to.    

To live the world, and not just live in it.