tHE aBSURD lIFE, pART oNE

I was traveling at a speed which once would have been called "breakneck," and one which, wrongly directed, promised to break a lot of other body parts, too. Willingly and voluntarily I had strapped my flesh-and-blood frailty into a steel-and-plastic projectile, and then fired myself into the distance, expecting to land some twenty miles from my starting point. It was somewhere in the middle of that trajectory that I began to consider the absurdity of it all.

Of course I'm talking about commuting to and from work every day, or even just driving a car in general. Millions do it. I've done it for years. But suddenly I found myself asking, "How in the world is this a good idea?" I was struck by the blatantly arrogant nonchalance with which I regularly blast through time and space belted and latched inside a metallic road-rocket.

It occurred to me that, when perfectly developed and conditioned, a purely self-powered human can expect to achieve something along the lines of a four-minute mile. There are cars on the road today that can rack up four-mile minutes. Mine, by the way, is not one of them. Nevertheless, the forty-five miles-per-hour I generally attain for much of my commute is roughly triple the top-notch miler's speed. Presuming, of course, that he could somehow maintain that pace for an hour!

It isn't that I am suddenly afraid of my car or the traffic that surrounds me. It's not even that I've been stricken with that "sense of my own mortality," some people talk about. It's far more basic than that. I've developed a guilty feeling that maybe we're stretching the fine points of some universal, unwritten laws, or even breaking them outright. Or maybe they are laws that are written out plainly, but we simply choose not to read them. Laws of nature? Laws of God? Laws of common sense? Of physics or biology or mathematics? Genetics? I don't really know. It just sometimes seems to me that the benefit we gain from constant high-speed travel is more than offset by the loss of something less tangible. Like we should treat those machines, and the velocities at which they convey us, with a little more respect or maybe even a little superstition. Or just a healthy dose of skepticism.

Maybe I'm just realizing that the time I save by the pace I keep comes at a cost. Perhaps the absurdity of the automobile is recognizing that the rhythm of human life can only be accurately maintained at a certain tempo. Accelerate the music too much and we begin to drop beats that are forever lost. And instead of experiencing a richly textured cadence that rises and falls in natural swells and ebbs, all we hear is the machine gun staccato of a single, mechanical, unvarying, and ultimately pointless snare.

I'm not suggesting we abandon automotive technology in favor of some form of Luddism. I'm just thinking that maybe we should pay closer attention to the cost of the time we save. Kind of like setting up a sort of "life-beat budget." That might just enable us (or even force us!) to pay less for saved time and to enjoy it more.