Struck By The Bus
Since I was struck, visually, by the vividness of a green double-decker bus as it rounded a corner of road, coinciding with the sun splitting through heavy cloud cover and consequently sparking the idea to find one thousand such understated significant moments in one literary day, the ability to see these moments has sharpened. I like to think that I would anticipate the bus experience should the circumstances repeat. This is my miracle mindset, this is where the Wishbone Soup attitude has lead me. It doesn’t prevent sadness or pay bills, it just makes me feel centred.
I say ‘just’ because the concept is simple, it’s the practice that fouls most people up. Like realistic diet goals, it’s more about developing a healthy habit than denial or blame or any negative reaction.
It has taken effort, I do practice at this, and the 1,000 Miracles In One Day project is part of this. I’ve had the advantage of being rather poor (by Western European standards) and the luck to be inclined towards invention rather than complaint.
So… thanks to chicken collarbones and a bus, some kind of enlightenment is happening, developing…
This narrative is a work in progress.
381
Sun refracts through rain
We see a rainbow, the shape
Of an unhappy mouth, an arc
That will elicit smiles
382
Rinsed boots hit the lane mud
The moors are patterned by patched
Cloud shadows, as the scattering shapes
Disperse, to occupy other bits of sky
383
All the rest of the solid sky has melted
Molten sky runs in the gutter, drawn
Downwards, seeking sea level. The game
Is to seek ocean from sky and sky from ocean
384
I am thinking of later, when
Boy will twitch a smirk and Mr
Will laugh out loud at my
Impulse bought amusing item
385
The laugh share is water cycle
Vital to us, I think of this
Watching the rain stream past
My ankles, seeking the sea’s level
386
Across the valley, other pockets
Of domiciles have sturdier roofs
Ours is patched, at best, but, currently
Lets the rain slide, in sheets, in drips
387
It used to rain in the bathroom
Before the new tiles. It became part
Of our narrative, the children
Love these quirksome monologues
388
From delving into abandoned crypts
To the annoyance of the gas boiler
Our volume of stories props open
This narrative is a work in progress
389
Chimney smoke escapes, ghost shaped
In daylight, surprised by a blue sky
It has left the coal and the smoke behind
From the box of the fireplace, swooped up
390
The first leaf turns yellow. From buds
The leaves have opened up to take
Sustenance from sun and rain and air
Now the earth calls, come down, come down
Comments
We need these moments, and we need to be attentive to them. They are the moments when new possibilities emerge. The narratives that frame such forms of exposure to the sudden and unexpected will tend to deviate from the standard, causal “this because of that”-structure. They will have cracks and breaks, intimating how we genuinely come to experience something as opposed to merely “moving through” it. Falling in love is one such narrative context. While we can tell when it happens to us, the involvement it demands is open, promissory, risky, possibly life-changing, and sometimes deeply disappointing.
Experiences like this, which explode the empty repetition of standard clock time, offer glimpses of a different and deeply intriguing type of temporality that has the power to invest our lives with greater meaning, possibility and excitement than a life merely measured on a grid could ever provide.’
Espen Hammer is a professor of philosophy at Temple University. His most recent book is “Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory,” published by Cambridge University Press.
Taken from article in the New York Times 1st January 2012