In transit, there is an elusive experience. It is motion, yes, but more profoundly, transition, the shifting between worlds, filled with intricate, often invisible life. A feeling I’ve had countless times: driving alone late at night on empty highways, flying above cities lit by lives I'll never brush, watching from my train window, landscapes and lives speeding by.
The word, "sonder," frequents this machination, the realization that everyone we pass lives a life as vivid and complex as our own. Still, this feeling goes beyond sonder—it includes not only the complexity and depth of another’s experience, as a fog passing through. Brief parallel passage through whole universes, momentarily glimpses of lives that carry on unknowing of my traversal.
My linguistics struggle here. I circle around meaning, stringing together adjacent words hoping they will somehow triangulate the wordless abstraction I’m aiming towards. How do I describe the indescribable? Like naming God—the universe, the Tao that cannot be named, Yahweh, Allah, the One, the Spirit, Soul, the All. Each word captures something, yet none can hold the entirety. Alan Watts once gave a talk he said couldn't have a title because its essence was too fundamental. Similarly, the Tao resists naming because naming constrains, and reality is infinite.
Orbit the concept, see for yourself, do you recognize the center? The very practice of seeking reflects the transit itself. Pursuit of the intangible abstraction clarifies truth. Motion towards, rather than the still center.
Digitality can both speed, and complicate this seeking motion. Immersion in digital space increasingly numbs me, burns up my dopamine pathways, demanding more stimulus, dulling the clarity. Text to text Conversations online do not sustain depth; brief sparks without lasting flames. Voice conversations are better, more vivid, yet rare. Purely digital connections seem to leave me hollow and unfulfilled, lacking the warmth of a friends face and physical presence.
Tonight, having traveled, finding myself in a new place, still tethered to digitality, I confront familiar hesitation. I had anticipated solitude, openness, space to breathe, yet fell again into digital distractions, the twitch towards knowable numbness. The clarity sought through my motion knowingly blurred.. Clarity arrived late, it was the recognition that tomorrow would not offer this same solitude.
This reflection itself, partly transcribed from voice, edited in text, typed in taps, speaks to the very experience of transition. Writing, editing, revising—all carry different frequencies. Typing expands potential, sometimes overwhelming. Speaking aloud compresses thought into immediacy, capturing raw spirit but rambling and drifting, requiring editing later. Both add and subtract to the final product, the very friction between them carves the pathway.
Letter by Letter
Word by Word
Sentence by Sentence
Paragraph by Paragraph
Ultimately, my journey revolves around increasing freedom: to more deliberately my direct time, energy, and conscious attention. Each act reflecting alignment or distraction. To walk fully aligned with the divine—the Tao, God, the all—means becoming friction, embracing flow. Everyday life presents the flow continuously. Jobs, obligations, digital distractions, all compromises/tradeoffs, in aim of walking the balance beam towards ideal alignment and practical survival.
In motion, in transit, this tension clarifies briefly, beautifully through the windows of cars, planes, and trains. Here, between departure and arrival, in a moment of suspended animation, where life's elusive truths shimmer briefly. Impossible to hold, and invite endless pursuit, a journey orbiting toward the center ever-present yet infinitely distant transition.