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What A Surprise

Sometimes I have a thought that seems so profound and magical at the time that I have to let it roll around my brain for a few days to see if the epiphany is real and passes the few days later test or if it was one of those faux profound alcohol-fueled moments that seem altogether trite a few mornings later.

Usually the magical moment is not magic at all as it falls flat on its proverbial face and I realize the next day that it was less an ephiphany and more an apophany being so totally mundane as to have no meaning worth repeating and nothing that would cause anyone to pause and think about it. It is like the old country song that the girls always get prettier at closing time or things always look different in the light of day.

This is one of those extraordinary realizations that passed the few days later test.

It came from the dark, like deep thoughts often do. I don’t know where I was at the time but I was thinking as I often do about my mortality and meaning, again reaching no conclusions, and my thoughts went to the little girl on her bicycle and how wondrous it is to be a little girl on a bicycle. And I stopped at the liquor store and thought how amazing it was that the person at the counter even existed, let alone why she existed and that when she got home she would sit down to a tasty dinner.

I did this exercise a few more times while just looking at different people like the man in the Yankees baseball hat who diligently walks his small, black, friendly mutt around my block at the same times every day or the smiling Pakistani man who makes small talk as he pumps my gas and knows that it’s always fill it up on the card or the member of our beer club who seems to know all there is to know about the Civil War or the other member of our beer club who is right now recovering from triple bypass surgery and has absolutely no plan to leave this world any time soon or the men who arrive pretty punctually on most Thursday mornings to collect the trash and recyclables.

Or the friend from North Carolina who has honed her craft over the years and is a wondrous artist or the man who ran for and was elected mayor or the neighbor who works for an exterminator and helped me out with a problem with yellowjackets or another neighbor who works 12 hours a day driving a truck and delivering windows or the windsurfers who zip along on the waters off Sandy Hook or the Beatles or Van Gogh or the nun from Frelinhuysen Township who has dedicated her life to environmental causes or Babe Ruth and Ernest Hemingway and the painter Caravaggio.

Or the friend who discovered the key to her world was with the ancient art of shamanism or the other who patiently coaches his son’s soccer team every weekend or the worker at the motor vehicles inspection station who has to put up with all sorts of abuse and very little thanks and does it day after day so she can pay the rent.

Or the wife who continues to sort out life, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing but always trying and always steadfast and proud of her family or the son who has only his personal compass to lead him to something and who will not fail or the daughter who valiantly tries and tries despite her difficult shortcomings but always finds something to smile or laugh about and continues to succeed in her own way.

And I thought about how miraculous it is that people have been created out of something totally unknowable and that they all share an instinctive drive to survive and to find joy and even though it often seems so evasive, they keep trying even if they usually don’t quite make it.

And how each person I see and don’t see and will never see is absolutely unique among the 7.594 billion people who inhabit the earth and how at the same moment, each member of humanity is pretty much the same, with pretty much the same needs like belonging, being loved and loving, along with the creature comforts.

And how there are unique babies being born at this instant who will be given the mysterious chance at life just like every other person who ever walked the planet and how some will go way beyond expectations and some won’t but how they will all share in the mystery of life.

And the word that kept returning to me was “special” and how special is each inhabitant and then I thought about myself and how I am also special and that blew my mind because most of the time I see myself as nothing very special. And yet I am amazingly special and so are you, and you, and you and every one of you or every one of us.