Rushing

I was telling Epo-Na that I had gone for a leisurely drive in the countryside, enjoying the scenery, when the cars behind me began honking for me to hurry up. I also told her that I always enjoyed when there had been an incident on the road, not for the people involved, but because when the traffic was stopped I could finally see a lot of things that you don’t see when you hurry past them, like trees and rivulets and animals in the fields.
‘Yes’, she said, ‘human animals are always in a hurry to get wherever it is they want to get to. But when they get there after all that hurry, they most of the time find out that it was not really that important to get there so fast, and that in the meanwhile they lost a lot of interesting things on the road, risking their own lives and those of other human animals for some banal appointment. For us it is different. The only time we are in a hurry is when some predator is after us, but otherwise, if we get to the water hole at twelve o’clock or ten minutes after does not make any difference. In the end we get there anyway. Also the turtle gets there in the end.’
‘So what is it in human animals that wants them to rush rush rush all the time?, I asked.
‘I think it some kind of a nervous impasse – your body and mind have been rushing for so long that they cannot stop it, like a motor that is overheated. It has to do again with that wanting that we talked about they other day: wanting more than you need. Human animals want more than they need, and so they rush to the shop to buy what they don’t need, but before they rush to the shop they have to rush to work to get a better paid salary so that they can rush back to the shop to buy more of those needless things. It is a rat race, and at the end there are the tranquillizer pills.’ She giggled, shaking her head in wonder.
‘But what if it is a really important thing they are rushing to, like an important meeting. ‘Human animals get angry when you are late.’
‘That is their problem’, said Epo-Na impatiently. ‘If human animals can’t wait ten minutes for you to turn up then they really do need those tranquillizer pills.’
Epona was silent for a long time, pondering.
‘You see,’ she said softly’, I have told you before that human animals always live either in the past or in the future, and so this present moment, where the future meets the past, is overlooked, is not lived, is not loved. When you are rushing, you are jumping from the past over the present moment into the future. And so you missing out on a lot of things.’
We were both silent.
Somewhere in the trees the robin was singing, and the bees were buzzing in the field flowers. And suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared an enormous double rainbow, framing the peacefully grazing herd in a multicoloured arc.
I looked at Epo-Na, and tears came into my eyes. She rubbed her face against mine and we stood there for a long time, in that space where the future meets the past.