The surprising teachings of a road marking
Dear All,
I share these words with you in love, in the hope that they may serve as a loving and gentle reminder to remember what is truly important in life, in your life.
Recently I walked past a large and industrial port area where I initially felt tempted to get lost in all kinds of judgments given the dominant presence of this area. Until I saw a simple 'road marking' hanging and I realised that this simple sign was once designed by someone, then made by a factory where it undoubtedly passed through the hands of many people, then was transported before it could end up at the company where the people who hung this sign work. All these people involved in this simple and inconspicuous sign, what might their lives have been like? What is their history? Imagine that all these people who contributed to this inconspicuous sign, all these people were once children. Having been the child of two loving parents who had a wish to welcome these children. Now imagine that these children were introduced to the world in their own unique way, got to know their own dreams, gained their own experiences and were slowly allowed to taste more and more of this life. They played, went to school, made friends, fell in love for the first time. They undoubtedly felt happy, rejoiced, amazed, but also sad, confused, irritated. Gradually they learned about the many twists and turns that every person experiences. As they got older, they started thinking about how they wanted to organise their lives and eventually they ended up at the company where they worked when this sign came about.
In the most trivial road marking we see that the entire life story of all these people is present, their ideas, their dreams, their hopes, their wishes and actually their entire life story. And, how does that actually differ from ours? How is what makes them human different in any demonstrable sense from what makes me human? How wonderful it is that when we do our best, we can find humanity in everything. In that, in the encounter with those people, we can ultimately see ourselves, in a fuller sense precisely because we see the other. One could even argue that just because we see the other, we can only speak of truly seeing ourselves.
“Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.”
I must admit that I also find it difficult because the industrial port area is a place par excellence where I feel a lot of resistance, because places like this are for me the physical manifestation of the destruction of the world. But here too we should not ignore the fact that humanity is present there and that these people always have similar wishes to us, since “they” also belong to “us”. It is easy to lose sight of humanity in facets that we cannot identify with (such as an industrial port area) or in which we do not recognise ourselves (such as a simple road marking) but even there, perhaps especially there, we must try to continue to want to see humanity. Even if you don't see it, try to see it anyway, see it as an exercise, an invitation.
Because, if we can see it in a simple road marking, how enchanting and extremely beautiful must it be to be able to see it in a human being?
In love and reverence, sven
