I spent a long time in my car today, driving very slowly due to traffic. This gave me a lot of time to notice my surroundings, and to think. But the most memorable sight happened to be something I saw earlier, before the traffic jam took hold. I saw it for only an instant: a man's shoe, lying on the side of the road. It seemed almost to have been placed there deliberately, since it was neat and clean, upright and perpendicular to the roadway.
My first thought concerned the origins of the shoe - to whom did it belong, and how did it get there, and so on. I quickly realized that all of these questions, and also the shoe itself, did not matter to me at all. I mean, I really didn't care, and it didn't affect me at all.
It's funny, how most people probably haven't given that shoe more than a (literally) passing glance with its attendant brief thought. We all moved on, and by now the shoe has possibly already been run over by a careless driver. At the very least, it has been ruined by this evening's rain.
And yet. To the owner of the shoe, it could be a significant event to have lost it. It could even possibly have far-reaching consequences in his life.
This is such a metaphor for life, I thought. The thing that seems so important to me today, means practically nothing to almost anyone else. It's not that they don't care; it's just that it doesn't have the same resonance in their lives as it does in mine.
We all experience both sides of that. That's our common ground. What would happen if all of us cared about everything?
What's important to me is that I made it home safely, only two hours late. And with two shoes.
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