The Midnight Pedestrian

Where are you going? Does it matter? Too much of life is spent aimed at a destination, when actual living, in the verb sense of the word, is done along the way. With the occasional car speeding by I'm reminded that speed is relative, and that my comparatively slow pace is simply another perspective, one fraught with potential. In possession of a car or lacking one, I have always been a midnight pedestrian. Hedged in by the slumbering (and probably alarmed) homes and businesses of the world, the only limits I encounter are those borders, those quiet, unquestioning representatives of monotony in its purest form. But within that wall of numbered concrete, shadowed by street lamps and porch lights, lies the land of dark promise. My personal atmosphere widens and absorbs, without those daylight presences who stain my canvas with the blinding light of consciousness and the deafening roar of communication. Here, now, the internal processes of society's mind, intricately fragmented and thus monolithically unified, quite literally sleep, and in the night that's left when day shuts off is another world entirely. My world. Movement bound by no law and no restriction, I operate the brilliant machinery that is in itself my only possession, placing my feet where I choose in the direction of my whim. This is the only way to really see your world: you need to move through it. All it really takes to broaden your perspective is a step. Walk through this territory of relativity, where ownership is only equivalent to force, and where force spends such little time. Open your eyes every once in a while, at those times when they'd most like to close, and look out on a world defined by its lack of definition, shaped by diverted attention and a lack of presence, and yet carries with it an identity entirely its own. Join it. Add to it. Become for a short while the shadow version of your self, that entity that is cast on your unconscious by the light of your goals and hopes and dreams. Understand what it means to be entirely Present, in a place where no one is awake to remember or predict. If time is a construct of the human mind, then essentially the night is timeless. Or not. Sleep is pretty enjoyable too.