Transit

How can we understand something that is in transit? We watch people pass as though they are ghosts on their way someplace else, and yet we see them return over and over. Where is it they go, from whence they keep returning? Why is it that, each time they pass, they act as though they do not know us, as if they have not seen this road before?

I myself am in transit. I walk the same road and do not know why. Often, I do not recognise the road for many years but then, always I see something I have seen before. This is how I know I am in transit. Sometimes I think, ‘this road is different; perhaps it will take me someplace new,’ but always it is the same, and always it takes me to the start again.

I met a man in transit on the same road, going someplace else. I asked him if he had seen this road before.

“Yes,” he said, “I know it very well.”

“Where does it lead?” I asked.

“To the start,” he said.

“Where does it start?” I asked.

“In transit,” he said. “Transit does not start or end. It is, by nature, transit.”

I thought for some time about what the man said.

“Does one not become weary of transit?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “but unless one learns how to be – and not be – at the same time, one will always be in transit.”

I left that man because he was going a different way. Many years later, I met him on the same road with a different face. When I saw him, I noticed the road was the same as all those years before.

“How is it I am always on this same road?” I asked him. “All the twists and turns are the same. For many years I think it is a new road, but then I recognise something, and I see it is the same.”

I paused for a moment and thought.

“I think the road is a circle,” I said.

“It is not a circle,” he replied. “A circle is round, but the road has no shape. It is in transit. Something in transit cannot have shape.”

For many more years I saw many more people in transit. I watched them drifting by like ghosts. They did not see that the road was all the same. Some of them thought that they had shape, but I knew they could not have shape. Something in transit cannot have shape. I looked at myself to see if I had shape. Then I realised that all along the road, I had been looking at myself to see if I had shape.

Many years later, I met the same man on the road with a different face.

“Is there anything other than this road?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied.

“I hear,” I said, “that there is such a thing as stillness.”

He smiled at me, and we parted again.