Today I was standing at the dropped barriers of a level crossing—waiting for the train to cross the road. As I stood, I wondered about this train that must be approaching. I realised I did not know anything about it—its colour, it size, its speed, even the direction from which it would come. There was only one thing I knew—that it would be a train. I waited – silence. It struck me as odd that there were so many unknowns about this object which was forcing me to wait in the road. Odd that I knew only its possibility in the most general sense. Then I heard it approaching—I formed a picture of it in my mind—then suddenly it was there, upon me, already passing. And it was nothing like my fleeting mental picture of it before it came—it was only a single carriage, colours I couldn’t have guessed, and going much slower than I had expected. I had put my fingers in my ears to protect them from the noise, but it had been unnecessary. Before I even began to walk, others were already crossing as the barriers lifted—a man on a bicycle eating a sandwich, a slender, good looking woman in a blue shirt and jeans who licked her Revlon-red lips as she smiled fleetingly. I was stunned by the shock of it, this train – and its unknown nature that had crashed into my life. I was right about it being a train, but I was wrong about everything else – everything else about it that I had supposed had been incorrect. And if it had broken down or been involved in a collision before getting to the crossing, my wait would have been in vain and even my assumption that a train was coming would have been incorrect. Should we, I wondered, wait for a revelation of something which we can formulate only in the most general sense? Then I watched the young woman as she walked away, the barriers still lifting above her. I wondered if she would look back—lick those intensely red lips once more, make them glisten in the sunshine—just for a second include me in her life. She turned slightly, looked up at the barriers as they swung into place with a clunk and walked on. And my whole sense of being lifted. I felt as if my feet were off the ground. I could bound across the railway line and look down on the track as it ran out into the distance. I could swoop through the air in pursuit of the train and overtake it as I made my way to the coast and the ocean beyond. And beyond that—to all that there was. I was lifted by my realisation beyond everything that usually confined me. I knew that it wasn’t my forecasting of events that would bring me joy, nor the fulfilment of my expectations, nor the excitement of the phenomena that sometimes drowned me I existence, it was simply that I was there.
