getting there

The morning traffic is awful. So awful she could run an entire women’s conference on menopause while sitting in the driver’s seat of her car watching the freeway signs pass at their gruelingly dawdling pace.

Most days, she curses her city and its gut-busting traffic, but today she is grateful for it because it gives her the chance to get where she is going. She realizes that some of her best thoughts happen when she is getting where she is going. Important new thoughts, like, Oh! I am getting where I am going! Getting where she’s going is a thing, she thinks. And she needs this thing, this plodding time, between leaving and arriving, to get there, to get to her next there.

Getting there, she thinks, is underestimated. She wishes she could remember all those thousands of times she blow dried her hair before arriving at work, or all those millions of times she drove to pick up one of her daughters from softball practice. She wishes she could remember all the times she lifted a glass to her lips, not only that first sip of wine. She wishes she had taken more notice while clicking the remote control, not only when she arrived satisfyingly at CBS Nighty News with Nora O’Donnell. So much time has been spent trying to get there, so that getting there was lost. It makes her sad to think of all that getting there time just…gone.

So, today she is happy to not have Flash Gordon-style instantaneous blink-of-an-eye transport, like she usually wishes. In this instant, she loves her traffic-filled city for giving her that dilly-dallying shilly-shallying time to just get where she is going.