Finding Gold In a Long Commute

Recently I was laid off from the job that I had held for 13 months. It took me some 18 months to find that job, not including a period of waiting after another job didn’t work out. I had felt financially stable, finally, and I was beginning to get some debts paid off. It was a good feeling.

Then the shoe dropped. Shoe, heck. Felt like Paul Bunyan’s heaviest boot!

I was surprised at how quickly I adjusted. Of course there was no job, no income, no certainty about the future. (They said I would be one of the first to be called back, but I can’t wait for six months and it will probably be that long.)

But also there was no getting up at 5:00 a.m., no 100-mile round trip every day on top of 8 hours spent typing, no more driving east at sunrise and west at sunset, no more reading minuscule print off product packaging, no more typing Spanish text…OK. There are things I can like about this. That’s good.

So let me think a little about that 100-mile round trip. I was literally adding 500 miles to my odometer every week. That’s 2,000 miles in one month. It was a lot of wear and tear on my car which, fortunately, was fairly new when I got this job.

Over those 13 months, I had time to watch each season in detail – the crops ripening in the summer heat, farmers harvesting during the autumn as the colors changed, the austere beauty of a winter sunset over a field full of snow, the challenge of driving in sleet and snow storms, and of course the new greening as the world came back to life, and the planting of the new crops.

There was time to think about the seasons, about the Creator of all things, about myself and the growth I felt going on within me. And I have to conclude that it was a remarkable year. Some really odd things happened to me during the year that I put 100 miles on my car every day.

There were several unitive moments – times when the world and life somehow seemed so beautiful that I couldn’t bear it. For instance there was the day last fall as I was driving home, enjoying the perfectly clear deep blue sky, bright sunshine, vivid colors, crops ripe in the fields and farmers working in clouds of dust to harvest them. It was, for several minutes, so beautiful that I wept briefly. There was another moment like that a few weeks ago as I waded through the crowds leaving the park after the Fourth of July band concert and fireworks display. There were others. These two were among the most vivid.

Then there was the boil-water order I found one day last summer when I got home from work. My job was close to a Wal-Mart, and I decided that instead of depending on boiling water I’d buy some bottled water the next day. (There wasn’t any left in town by the time I got home.) So the next day I went into the Wal-Mart, a store I had never been in before, and I had no idea where the beverages were. The usual greeter wasn’t around, and I wondered who could direct me. It was only a few seconds later that a man came steaming past me into the store, pushing a noisy shopping cart full of empty plastic jugs. Supposing that he intended to fill them with water, I followed him and he led me right to my destination. It was the timing of his appearance that made me see the incident as, well, not a coincidence.

And one day I was struggling with low blood sugar, at the end of the work day, and faced driving home at a time when I really wasn’t well. I prayed that somehow I would get home safely. Now I make a habit of driving 55 mph, which is the posted speed limit on the two-lane highways in my state. Everybody who comes up behind me passes me as soon as they get a chance. That day, however, there was a series of drivers who would come up behind me on each leg of my journey home. When one turned off, another would come along in a couple of miles. I was followed all the way into my home town. On a day when I had asked for help, not one of those drivers passed me. Again, I didn’t think that was a coincidence.

You see what I mean? Things that don’t normally happen to me were happening. Maybe it was partly a matter of me being more aware of what went on around me. But that doesn’t explain the afternoon at work when, for just a split second, it seemed that I was standing behind my chair and looking at the back of my head. It was over so quickly that it could have been just a figment of imagination. But I was flooded with emotions and sensations that clearly were not imaginary. It had been a true out-of-body experience. For a tiny fraction of a second I had been something more than I normally am, larger, more confident, stronger, more joyous. It was a true mystical experience. I can prove it…because to this day I can’t really describe those feelings; my description is only a guess. And probably the only truth we know about such experiences is that they are indescribable.

So all that driving was worth it, because it opened me up to new levels of perception and sensitivity. And that is what I need the most, after all. I’m working on this current unemployment situation from the inside out, and I’ll need all the perception and sensitivity I can muster.