Tick Tock

Tick tock. 

I stared at the watch loosely strapped on my wrist to see how swiftly that second hand moves. I have been stuck in traffic for the last forty-five minutes. I glanced at the window only to realise that home is still another thirty minutes away from that point.

It could have been just fifteen minutes if it were not for the slow-pace motion. Ah, traffic.

I lamented it. I regret every second wasted when I’m trapped in a moment of halt, unproductively waiting for the long drive to end. All I was left with was a moment to stare at the blank faces of those who were seated around me.

Intriguing. I wonder what thoughts are penetrated in their silence and stillness, while we are all caught up in an inescapable moment – there were nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

When a man is summoned to a state of waiting, of inactivity, how does the human mind work? Where does the body divert all the energy? What does one actually do when there is nothing else to.

Is it man’s natural intuition to continue thinking about what to do next once the stillness of the moment ends? When we line up at supermarket queue, when we wait for a ride to come or caught in a traffic jam, the mind never cease to work. But what does the mind tell us during these moments?

This is what traffic had me pondering. The irony.

Tick tock. I keep on staring at my watch every now and then.

Tick tock. We haven’t moved much.

I could not stand loafing. I do not own the world’s best forbearance. I feel that every minute is a chance to have done something. Something else, other than waiting. Seventy five minutes, that is three hundred and seventy five minutes in a working week. Do the math further. Imagine how much of my time have been squandered, spent without any gain, because the government has given less attention to what could have been the metro’s most basic yet most obvious problem. The government. Ah, don’t even make me start.

Despised as I am, I figured there is not much that I can do now. My eagerness to remove my being from that traffic has only led me to a series of little anxieties. I was feeling very stressed although my body has just been seated for almost an hour now. Agitation grew and I was again faced with my love-hate relationship with Manila. I continued to be vexed no longer just about wasting my time in the traffic but with the government, the cheap street lights the engineers decided to install and a lot more things that are just, trivial.

So I shrugged it off, I detached myself from that state. I was no longer concerned with what I needed to do, what I could have done or what else I wanted to. For a second, I didn’t care about the time.

It was surprising with how much lighter I felt almost instantaneously.

I resigned myself to the moment and be present where I tried to withdraw myself from.

I stared again at the faces around me, they seem to be calmer than me. It astonished me that somehow, I was the only one who may have considered the moment cumbersome. Have they already been desensitised to this usual routine? Have they no other activities to muster? Have they accepted the moment ahead of me? Or maybe because the night has grown old and all they wanted was to get home.

Maybe not. Maybe I have just pre-occupied myself with my long list of self-imposed tasks. The time lost in traffic maybe inevitable but there is something else I can do. To think.

It is in the silence of the moment, albeit the chaos in the streets, that made me realise that it is not about the number of activities I have finished for the day. In the usual abode of life, others imply that self worth is measurable. What you have done accumulates to who you are. The road has gotten to be an Olympic arena of goal-reaching, that of which I consider egocentric.

It gives us reassurance, every time we have done something we assume is worthwhile. It bestows us with a personal affirmation that we are doing something right – a feeding of our self-worth. It is human nature to search for that affirmation and by searching for that affirmation, we require time. The time to finish what we need to do.

Tick tock.

Being trapped in that traffic made me feel that I have lost some of my time, as if spilling coins from my pocket. But gained more than what money can buy nor time can grant: perspective.

It is not about the amount of checkboxes I have marked on my list, not the number of hours I have enlisted in return of an overtime pay. Nor the seventy five minutes I have wasted in that traffic jam. It is how I have spent my minutes, my hours, my day.

Within the twenty four hours of the day, eight of those I spent at work, two and a half of those I spend on the road. Do I get something genuinely valuable? Something that is priceless and timeless?

Have I thought about the people that are dear to me? Have I considered how they were for at least once in the seven days of a week? Have I been too busy minding my own world to realise that this world is but shared?

Was I too busy examining what the world does instead of what the world is?

At the very end of the day, was I pleased of what I have done? Or was it your boss you were trying to impress? Have you fulfilled your own desires or was it what society expects from you?

Have you known much about the world around you? Have you even been to the world?

I have been too hustled minding life’s most buoyant activities - the common chores of my daily life, too occupied with what to do next after finishing the other. I forgot to chase not those which are tangible but those that one cannot necessarily see, those I cannot touch.

Truth is, I never really lost a minute. I never even lost a second from it. It is just a matter of how I have spent those that I have, bargained it over the things that inhabit life’s superficial surfaces.

Being stuck in that traffic wasn’t so bad after all. I came home losing more time that I would have been willing to give but gained a thing or two.

To live the world, and not just live in it.