I have this paranoia of missing the bus. It’s more a fear of being left behind to be honest. It’s not something I experience when I’m driving anywhere, late and harried, and somehow my fear of missing something at the other end kicks in. Of course, the show can’t start without me, so that mitigates any anxiety. As a result I’m always early for the bus, super early, like half and hour early sometimes.
I bask in the sun of the bus stop eating my lunch early and show up at work much earlier than required. It’s a small thing really, a tiny crevice of a thing that leads me head first into that first feeling of being left behind as a child. The first feeling of my mother leaving Guatemala, leaving her mother, her country, her home and leaving me. Leaving to find another life for herself, for perhaps us, somewhere so far way past the horizon and the silohuette of the shacks lined up against the steep hills of Zone Three’s grime, bracken, a place we called La Limonada where you make lemonade out of limes. It’s hard for a child to imagine deserts, endless blue of sky, terrains that linger in the back of that dream as you waken in the morning. I take a breath and am transported back, to easing into waiting, into trusting.
“The same laws that govern the growth of plants oversee our own internal and external changes. We observe, consider, work, and wonder, tilling the soil of our lives, planting seeds, and tending them. Sometimes the hard part is knowing when to stop and let go, handing it over to the universe. Usually this happens by way of distraction or disruption, our attention being called away to other more pressing concerns. And it is often at these times, when we are not looking, in the silence of nature’s embrace, that the miracle of change happens.” –DailyOM
I see the NL bus which takes me across the Bay and this time, just once, I decide to wait for the next one.