11/03/2024 – We’re all just passing through

We arrived in Atlanta on Friday. We fly out tomorrow.

We left the snow in Colorado, where the Eastern redbuds spackle the still-leafless roadside with magenta, like frozen fireworks. In Oklahoma, the Branford pear trees are white popsicles, like sparklers caught mid-glitter. Arkansas has green grass. In Tennessee, crops are already planted. There are daffodils in Georgia…

On the road, we played the weather app game: +7 in Paris, -12 in Calgary, +19 in the ATL; cloudy, sunny, rainy – and I’m back to Matthew 5:45.

Driving the length of America in five days, you are faced with how all life goes on everywhere, all at once. And with how leaving one’s own lived experience is impossible. All you can do is expand your experience through physical acts, like travel, and through acts of imagination. The word “compassion” literally means “to suffer/feel with”. You can walk a mile in another’s shoes without even standing up.

Not that we have been particularly compassionate during this part of Supertrip. We cussed those who cut us up/off, moaned about coffee-spilling potholes, got stiff and grumpy. Even so, there were moments of connection, (doors held, juxtapositions reconsidered), moments of simple wonder: the earth’s great sedimentary scars, the interplay of clouds and sunlight, the sheer scale of even this one road. The millions of stories it could tell.

My life often lacks a sense of scale, even under Calgary’s prairie sky. With 4,500 km under the tyres this week, there is a recalibration. I cannot retain a sense of my own importance across so many miles. I don’t feel diminished: it is a freedom to know yourself as “just” one more soul, equally beloved, no more, no less. We are all just passing through.

Carey says “in 100 years we’ll all be dead”. It used to get to me, but I get it now. Few things are as important as they feel (though there are some that are). I say “the cockroaches will be fine”. Even the collective damage we do will pass with time.

What matters are the corollaries. Each moment is equally precious. Differences, entitlements are trivia, (though, without perspective, are too easily weaponised, to great harm). I have always tried to discern the greater good because, as “just another soul”, it seems the only reliable standard. I fear those who consider themselves especially beloved of God.

Driving only gives time for general impressions. Walking is a different, human pace. When I walked the camino in 2018, physically being on a path with others forced acknowledgement that we all share a common journey. Even so, most people were looking for a “camino moment”: the Italian woman who thanked me for a conversation in which her husband cried; the group who came upon me singing to myself and joined in, videoing us on their phones… The truth is every step is essential. It is continuity of movement and purpose that covers the distance. I try never to forget that.