27 December 2007
The Subway Station Epiphany
)Published on December 27th, 2007 @ 08:04:33 am, using 969 words, 135 views
e·piph·a·ny /ɪˈpɪfəni/ Pronunciation [i-pif-uh-nee]
–noun, plural -nies.
1. (initial capital letter) a Christian festival, observed on January 6, commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi; Twelfth-day.
2. an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity.
3. a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.
4. a literary work or section of a work presenting, usually symbolically, such a moment of revelation and insight.
I guess what I’m about to relate could be perfectly described as an epiphany (def 3). They’re funny that way, epiphanies… They come to you just as the sun is setting or your day is winding down, just as you’re sure you’ve experienced all a given day had to offer. Or at least that has been my experience.
This one caught me completely unawares. And the minute it began to pervade its smoky way into my brain, I knew that it would take a while for it to shape up into words. I knew I’d have a hard time making a coherent paragraph or two out of it. You could say I feel braver and more adventurous today… even if just as unequal to the task. So bear with me, if you will.
It started out with something very commonplace. I was making my way out of a subway station down this long, wide corridor (the kind you see at airports), surrounded by people, mostly moving in the same direction as I was, given the hour - some faster, some more slowly and I stopped to jot a few words down in a notebook, like I’d done thousands of times before, just as I do whenever anything with the slightest hint of promise occurs to me.
The moment I stopped, this simple, obvious yet foreign notion sent everything else packing as it took up sole residence in my mind. The unrelated words with the slightest hint of promise I meant to jot down were suddenly gone. There was only the experience of standing still – pen and notebook on hand - and watching the flux of people move along. I immediately began to see beyond the literal image. I went right past the individual stories, (which would’ve been the first draw in less epiphanous circumstances) right past the literal homeward bound motion of working people, striving to make that stretch quicker to get through - reflecting on the day they were leaving behind, daydreaming about a shower or being barefoot, possibly even counting steps (which I sometimes do). For some reason I focused on me – the only thing out of my field of vision – and marveled (yes, that’s the word) at the illustration of personal velocity unveiled before me (thanks to Rebecca Miller for coining the term.) Right off the bat, I remembered the movie and thought to myself ‘I get it. I see it now.’
I SAW that people’s destinations and speed in setting forth were utterly self-determined. It gave me a strange feeling of being left behind without the sense of abandonment. It left me with an intoxicating sense of control over my own destiny (of being dona do meu próprio nariz *). A sense of choice, of being able to choose when to stop and when to go on, when to simply refuse to budge and watch as the people who a second ago were shoulder to shoulder with me now got swept into their future (into a place I might not have been ready to see just yet) away from me and this I call my gravity.
Just the knowledge that you’re irreversibly connected to no one.
I SAW that everything is reversible and changeable and separable. There’s an enormous sense of freedom in realizing that control is both non-existent and omnipresent. That as with everything else, the road towards achieving distance is a two-way street - you can passively watch others as they leave you behind just as you can take it upon yourself to dictate the dynamics by simply stopping dead in your tracks, and let changes happen for themselves, watch people become physically smaller until they disappear. You can retain your humanity, you can continue to share traits, make educated guesses about what makes them tick, preserve what you have in common, wonder about their need to hurry, sympathize with the stress they might be under, everything from the bleachers. Movement, progress, continuance are yours – entirely up to you and simply not imposable.
Standing inconspicuously on that corridor at 9pm, I intellectually understood that anyone’s personal journey can be stopped at will – paused, if you will. One’s time can be taken. One can very easily stop, take a deep breath, regroup, reassess and then press play again with some gained perspective (Michael Clayton). Perhaps ready to shift gears entirely. There’s no room for competition as to who arrives first because we all have different journeys, destinations, aspirations, timetables, deadlines. Your itinerary can be altered at any time (The Darjeeling Limited). The pressure of feeling like an inextricable part of things and thus having a sense of obligation to go with the tide can be eased at will. There is no having to move forward simply because everyone else is. There’s nothing that says you have to move along. There’s just what feels right.
* literally from the Portuguese ‘owner of my own nose’ meaning ‘one who determines their own destiny’
The Beatles - Blackbird/White Album
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Subway, epiphany, movement, personal velocity, Rebebcca Miller, present, progress, control, journey, destination, aspiration, timetable, deadline, competition, independence, perspective
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