I was sitting alone
on the downtown IRT on my way to pick up the children at their
after-school music classes. The train had just pulled out of
the Twenty-third Street station and was accelerating to its
cruising speed. All around me people sat bundled up in
mufflers, damp woolen coats, and slush-stained boots, reading
newspapers or staring off blankly as the train jerked along the
track. The air was cold and close, with the smell of stale
tobacco clinging to winter coats. An elderly pair exchanged
words in a Slavic tongue; a mother read an advertising sign to her
three bedraggled, open-mouthed children.
Then suddenly the
dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity
until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura,
and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous
connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What
began as a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying,
in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together,
including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling
together around the sun--our entire living cohort--formed one
united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious
accident of life. No matter what our countless superficial
differences, we were equal, we were one, by virtue of simply being
alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching
endlessly back and ahead. The vision filled me with
overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no
matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surpassingly
lucky to be alive. Then the train pulled into the station
and I got off.
Aliz
Kates Shulman
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