Travelling down Punt Road on the way to work I heard the
screams of an ambulance, and was luckily able to pull out of the far right lane
to let it pass, its lights flashing fiercely. But it didn’t get far. Five or
six vehicles shifted out of its way, but then it was blocked in on three sides
by chunks of traffic, that was stopped at lights and unable to find spaces to allow it
through. As the lights changed it would gain a little, only to be halted again
a few cars later on.
Was it
going to or coming from an accident? By the time I reached the top of the hill
at South Yarra I could see it below, still
hindered, apparently heading for the hospital. Its back windows had been
painted with an appeal for the paramedics’ pay rise, and I noticed that several
times under our stop-go regime the opposite side of the street held no oncoming
traffic, but the ambulance never was tempted to cross the double line.
What is
haste? How frustrating it must be, in a life or death situation, to be held up
by road rules, and the frailty, bewilderment, and inflexibility of the general
public behind the wheel of a car. Nothing seems to be happening fast enough.
Slowness,
it’s said, comes from God, and haste from the devil. Would taking the time to
think have allowed some of this traffic to move aside, like a shoal of fish —
even into a side street or a driveway — to make a way for this ambulance? Or
was the lack of a collective mind and its values the holdup? Speed is a
resource of time, but the scarce resource here was space.
Both space
and time belong to God: we only think we count them and allot them. Your
resources are not your resources, although there are more of them than you may
suppose. Sometimes they could well be combined with others to make a more godly
path for those in need to travel.
No comments:
Post a Comment