Thursday, May 19, 2011

a sense of broken vitality

I love walking home when it's warm, feeling the sun on my back as I leave no footprints in the familiar sidewalk. I've always had a pretty impressive internal compass. I'm not sure if being directionally oriented is genetic or learned but my mom is the same way. Somehow, I can usually tell which direction is home and, with one earphone in, I can get there, one step at a time.

Lately I've been listening to the same six songs on repeat (my favourite of Plain White T's) and it hasn't become boring yet. Maybe it's because when the songs mix with the sounds of traffic and fleeting birds and my heartbeats, there's no constancy to hold onto. Whatever the reason that I continue to love the diverse monotony, it's a great soundtrack for coming home.

I don't even know if I can describe how great it feels to come home. Today, I was alone and though I can be a social walker at times, I love that. I love the introspection and observation. How I feel completely out of my body and perfectly in it. I love noticing the telephone poles with countless staples that once attached my neighbours' declarations and calls for help in finding beloved pets. I love the spring and I love cherishing the fact of my existence, as the breeze blows cherry blossom petals into my face like overly large pink snowflakes.

But today there was also a somberness in my tread. Ever since watching this video, I've been constantly astonished at how I can feel for someone whose name I don't even know, whose path my life will probably never cross with. Last night, four blocks from where I sit at my computer, a pedestrian was killed in a hit-and-run car accident.

Not only as a newly licensed driver but as a pedestrian, this event horrifies and saddens me. It's scary and upsetting and I'm sitting here with this awful feeling of loss and grief for a woman whose face I probably wouldn't recognize. And she's gone and it's terrible but it amazes me that I have this capacity to empathize with the people who knew her and will miss her, to appreciate that her life was valuable and precious, even if I was never a part of it.

So I was walking home, crossing the intersection where a car delivered that fatal blow and then drove away,  with this broken sense of vitality. How can the world be simultaneously so beautiful and terrible? How can I go on breathing in the essence of spring to my lungs' full capacity when all around me, death is imminent? Our world is full of so many contradictions and contrasts. I've no conclusions. I guess we just have to deal with it the best we can.

1 comment:

Vita said...

On a personal level, death is horribly tragic -- like the woman who died, that's absolutely awful, not just for her but for her family and friends and even the person who hit her (although people who commit hit-and-runs are total bastards, to say the least).
This is going to sound morbid, but on a grand, impersonal level, I think that a natural death of old age is sort of beautiful, in the abstract. I just like the idea of our bodies eventually running out, despite our best mechanized efforts to preserve them. Everything has its time. Our bodies know not to overstay our welcome, even when our minds don't want to recognize it. Somehow, it's comforting to recognize that everything comes down to nature in the end.