Meditating On The Catwalk

I understand, now, why some adults fall to searching desperately for inner peace. The quietness—the focused stillness—that existed in me when I was a child, an adolescent, a twenty-one-year-old… the capacity to experience that kind of inner calm seems to be losing… losing against the adult world of existential assumptions, societal concerns, the identity of being an American in Indiana who works in an office and pays his taxes (hold the Mr. Anderson jokes, please). But what are these things, really? When did I start caring—am I caring, or just going through the motions because that's "how it goes"?

Although I still reflect, it seems so much harder to attain a clear view. I've grown more and more complicated within, full of new worries about people and things, more fear of losing them than I ever had before; more apt to suppress my impulses and tell myself it's nothing, really, I'm as free as I ever was. I've grown… riddled. So much is taken for granted in the name of this rat race. Existence itself is taken for granted, as if we’re all just so very certain what the world is that we have the time to complain about poor service at the drive-thru.

There is a difference between questioning and wondering at. I question a lot of things--but the sense of wonder is tougher to summon back, and it's an important sense, make no mistake. There is a feeling I have of flagging wisdom; that I’ve gained experience and intelligence, at the cost of my appreciation. Mastering the mundane details while the big, ethereal picture fades away. Anyone who knows me is aware that I’m not very religious, but I have always borne a species of faith in the souls of living things—and my soul feels more vague today than it once did, in part because the route back to its origins is less clear. Maybe it’s time to get into that box of mementos in the basement again...

There was a morning, in November of 1997. The love of my life was away at school; I was alone, recently reborn--having been hollowed out by a potent crash course in philosophy the spring previous. All my ideas about the world were shaky at best; I didn't trust what I thought I knew. I was attending IUSB, taking my first college courses (I remember the first class, the first day, the first thing we were assigned to read: the epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the first great tale humanity ever wrote down). And on this particular early morning I was making the drive to class, listening to Dave Matthews Band's Live at Red Rocks, which had just been released a couple weeks ago. And the first light snow of the new winter was starting to drift down as I rode to class.

The city is so gray at that time of year, but it's not yet the tired, wearying gray that comes later in the season. It's that pre-Christmas gray, where the cold air still feels like a refreshing contrast to the seasons just passed. It's a virginal chill that only emphasizes the warmth of the living body, the shell of heat you make inside a heavy coat that has slept for the last seven months. The traffic signals stand out so brightly, red and green, and the weightless white flakes look lost and countable, drifting as they are with plenty of air between them, falling any which way but straight down. #36 came on as I was nearing the school, and I ended up sitting in the parking lot a little longer than I would have otherwise, listening. Hani, Hani... come and dance with me...

That morning, it felt like I'd settled gently down into a perfect, lonely sort of heaven. In my Rilkean solitude I felt such immense peace inside. A few years later, someone managed to capture the moment perfectly in a song lyric:

My car became the church
and I the worshipper of silence there.
In a moment peace rolled over me
and the one who was beating my heart appeared.

- Ed Kowalczyk