On Road Work: Time and Travel.

I spent a lot of time on the road last week, with extra commuting and extra heavy traffic. Somehow I never compute the red lights into time taken to get anywhere, and while I allow the finding of parking a good slice, I usually forget next the walking to where I’m going. I admit to dodgy time management. Then there are uninvited and unwarned events like the fire truck flashing lights and sirens just as you’re about to enter the freeway tunnel, or everybody’s favourite: road work.

            I discovered on Monday that road work has even extended to the parking lot at the pool. Who’d be a road? Everybody walking, cycling, driving over the surface, wearing off the sheen. Road work gets posted whether or not there’s a maintenance vehicle or worker in sight. And since you never know when works begin or where they are, a blank area needs to be entered into the time travel equation for this too. I confess, alas, I fail to do it.

            What are the works of the road? Something to make it more solid, or cleaner —free of overhanging branches, dips, and oily surfaces— or less dangerous: filling potholes and painting guidelines. Sometimes deeper construction, where water gets under the road and collapses it. Sometimes less tragic, where accidents left wreckage on the road.

            How many roads are there? The road we drive on, walk beside, ride over, when we think about it, is an object, clearly of the physical world. But are there not also metaphysical roads? I saw one such road recently, at a performance, given in a church, of Handel’s Messiah.

            The audience had enjoyed an intermission, and now streamed into the church, displaying their differing gestures, heights, colours, costumes, glances, and casting of the eyes, hands, heads, and shoulders as they walked with one another, flowing past like figures in a film, on the other side of the baptismal font where I had stepped aside for a moment to observe. Everything became silent for me as I watched. I knew many of these people, what they had been and were now, and I saw them moving through time, on a road past the baptismal font, on a Way.

            Life is very similar, only rather more noisy most of the time. As all these people flow past you, a river of ever-changing beings, you can reflect on what each one has been and how they have been, both towards you and in the face of their transitions and tragedies, their hopes fulfilled or fallen by the wayside. You can contemplate their illusions and resources, their losses and gains, as if they were your own. One thing is certain: everything is in motion.

            What are the works of the road? Moments like this are one of them. Stepping aside to reflect. Taking time to regard the close connection between birth and death, as the Buddha did. Considering the relationship between faith and salvation, as the Gospels do. Viewing our fellows, both those we know and those we’ve never seen before and won’t again see, with charity and compassion. For we must be in love and charity with our neighbours before we reach our destination. To attain this is the work of the road. And it will slow you down.