Eye Contact

This evening has been one of those evenings in which you drink too much caffeine earlier in the day and late into the evening you have too much to think about. You think about the weight of the world around you, of the systems and metrics that over-simplify the infinite complexities of life and existence. Your thoughts drift from your own health to that of others, of those that have passed and of those yet to be born. You think about the imaginary power institutions have and utilize, how information is developed and manipulated. How endless bureaucracy endlessly loops around the roads and highways of the world.

You wonder how can we ever even begin to redress these challenges and pursue the goodness that humanity can possess. Kindness and stewardship. Fresh air and water. A lush world environment, nurtured by our ability to care for it and each other. All of our lives are under the dark impassable weights of the world's systems that we've developed. Subject to work within its endless forbidding corridors to ends unknown, wondering who or what could have created this path we blindly follow.

As the evening sky is eaten by outstretched light posts, nestlings wildly reaching into the night for a morsel of the last visible star, you feel lost and confused and alone. How can we fight the world that is forcing us into lives so unnatural, unripe; simply waiting for an unattainable self-enlightenment? What can you believe in if all is part of this tangled circular growth?

The city around you is breathing, rasping into the still-warm night air. The homeless line the streets in their sleeping bags like cocoons waiting for first light to emerge as butterflies never to be delivered. The lights stare at you indifferently and you sigh as you quietly walk your way home, lost in thought as you bear the weight of the world.

Out of the darkness emerges a passing face in close view. Your eyes lock and with a smile a man kindly, softly, asks "How are you doing?" with a tone so knowing of exactly where you are that the moment has already passed where you hastily replied "Good, how are you?" with automatic, systematic perfection to realize: you are not alone.