Very rarely does an advert on a billboard make me stop and think. This one did.
In case you can’t see the image well, the poster reads:
You are not stuck in traffic.
You are traffic.
Well, I was driving along the A41 at 50 mph, so I didn’t stop. But the mental processes were interrupted for a moment, and I found myself thinking about all the times that I distance myself from the people or events around me, treating them as ‘other’, when they are really me, and I am them.
Traffic jam in Bangkok
Your last few posts especially, are resonating with me. I Have mostly always had a sense of this, In 2000 I wrote a poem entitled ‘Chasing Grace’ It is not actually a very good poem but this is a few apt lines from it….
To experience the now
And the Love in the now.
To let go of concepts and ideas
And to know there are no answers
Or no questions either.
To Love unconditionally
Regardless of who is loving back.
To all be equal and one
For I am of you
And you are of me.
etc etc
To class people as ‘other’ is actually to try to reinforce disassociation, to disconnect, or distance ourselves from them. It is also to alleviate ourselves from any feelings of responsibility, or ownership, or guilt, or remorse towards their pain, suffering or cause. We protect ourselves by way of subconsciously pedal-stalling our own moral position. By convincing ourselves that they are ‘other’, we then can justify our feelings of detachment. And therefore are not directly privy to their feelings of exclusion because we choose to see them as choosing to behave as ‘other’.
Maybe if we look at all the negatives that we project onto ‘others’, we will have a better understanding of our own failures.
After all beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to see anything less is to have a big splinter in our own eye!
Then if we all believed that we were to be judged no higher than the least person we ever met, then how much greater would we all try to walk side by side with that person and lift them as high as we possibly could. There are no ‘others’ only ‘us’.
The sooner we understand that looking at ‘others’ is merely a reflection of ourselves, and sometimes not a very nice one, the more beautiful our world will be. When we are happy with what is reflected back to us , only then have we understood God and Love.
That is a really good point. It is always the simple observations that reveal a deeper way of seeing things.
Funny-James just commented on exactly the same advert when we were out in the car yesterday. He was convinced it was a them and us situation and we
spent a few minutes chatting about how we are part of the problem too! Maybe I’ll be slower to get irate at other drivers…
My husbands words in response to reading him your blog, and then reading him my response said “this is very contentious, if I considered myself to be the same as most of the people in this area, I would throw myself in the nearest river. I consider myself to be significantly superior.”
Gasp, horror movie, Alfred Hitchcock, chortle!!!!
I wonder how he will react when his home in transformed into a Catholic Worker farm when the first freed up room becomes available. I put this to him…….
His response “I will be safely scattered in the Colne river by then !!!!!”
What a fascinating insight inspired by a simple sign! It is true that, often, we try to isolate ourselves, be it intentionally or otherwise, when we should try to regard ourselves as a part of the whole process. I don’t recall who said it, but ‘No man is an island’ and the sooner we can see this, the more we stand to give to others and recieve from them.
Simon it was John Donne x
Thankyou mags x
[…] Recently, I had the experience outlined below, and then saw this picture, the GooglingGod post, and Father Steven’s thoughts. […]