Life in the Slow Lane

A not poem, not essay about nothing

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  Photo by Dylan Sauerwein on Unsplash

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Several times a week I drive back and forth between Lompoc and Santa Barbara. It’s about a 50 minute drive. It’s a beautiful trip, with bright yellow mustard plant against verdant rolling hills. This is along Pacific Coast Highway. Once I reach Highway 101 coming south from Lompoc and round the bend at Gaviota there’s of course the shimmering, sparkling blue Pacific Ocean, like a perfect calm azure mirror.

Usually, I drive slowly, around 65, in the right lane, taking my time. This is due to two things: First, the battery on my electric car drains less quickly if I go slower, and second: I feel like it. My mind lately has been in the slow lane. Others pass me by, almost angrily sometimes. I don’t mind. I’m in my own little world. I’m concealed in my own little black metal box on wheels. A death trap, some say.

I feel neither angry nor depressed nor sad on these slow drives. Mainly the sensation is pure angsty exhaustion. No: I do feel angry. And depressed. And sad. And confused. But mostly just tired. Spiritually tired. Like my cup is at the very brim. It can’t go any higher. My father’s cancer is dreary and spiritually inscrutable; we sit in the same room and glance away awkwardly, unable to hold each other’s eyes.

But it isn’t only that. It’s this moment in my life. I feel trapped. I want to travel but I can’t; not now. Not when my dad is struggling towards his thin gray terminus. Not when he needs me. Not when 24 hours could mean everything. My family is so fractured, like a plate of glass that was dropped and cracked, then stepped on and moved around aimlessly. I don’t care enough right now; or perhaps I care too much.

What happened to my wild and reckless twenties? Just yesterday, right? Yet here I am. Maybe halfway through this dumb shadow called existence. Plato’s Cave. I want to see the real thing. I want to experience something new. Something fresh. Different. I’m caught in the swirling drain of routine.

But I’m in love. I have a woman. A good, beautiful, loving woman. All my life, and here she is. Why now? I’m not complaining or second-guessing. I’m grateful beyond words. The simulacrum of My Past: The smear of complexity. Contradictions galore. The things I did, the things I didn’t do; the things I thought I wanted and needed; the sacrifices I made; the choices; the struggle. It was 98% me. I was the problem.

But then: The Super-bloom of sobriety. Change. The ticking clock of tortured Time. You don’t know what you don’t know and I hadn’t known so much. Now I learned.

Lust. Greed. Failure. Selfishness. Giving. Openness. Willingness. Solitude. Loneliness. Knowing myself. Knowing others. Offering love. Being wounded. Letting go.

I keep telling myself to embrace this question mark moment: it won’t last forever. Nothing does. Change usually comes like new spring dew, or like soft falling winter snow, or like melting streams in summer, or like a new cold wind in fall. However it comes, it comes. And I’m ready for it, whichever form it takes.

I’ve been thinking of birth, life and death a lot lately; how a man grows old, shrivels, becomes some sort of child again, returns to the mulchy womb of Earth. From dust, to dust. And simultaneously a child is born, awake into humanity and not-yet self-aware consciousness. Sacred meat, hurled into the messy blue ball which spins ceaselessly. Crying: No wonder. This ball is ballistic. Not even Camus or Sartre or Dostoevsky are comfort at the deepest level. For that I have only silence.