I've been doing some thinking lately, and something occurred to me while I was driving to work that led me down a path on which I hadn't really spent any time.
On my morning commute, I cross the Grand River, which is a large river by today's standards. It was a lot bigger, though, about 20,000 years ago when the glaciers receded from this part of North America-- it was over a mile wide, responsible for draining the vast quantities of meltwater and silt generated by the increase in average temperature. The wide valley exists today, occupied by what is, relatively speaking, a trickle, even though this trickle was enough to support major regional industries like logging and furniture manufacture from the mid-1800s through the first half of this century.
The bridge over the Grand on Interstate 196 is a typical modern structure, designed to move a large number of vehicles over the river in an extremely efficient manner. It is a concrete and steel affair lined with solid concrete guardrails that give the thousands who use it daily no idea that they're on a bridge at all, no idea that they're suspended some fifty feet above the surface of a mighty and dynamic body of water, no idea that they're moving between shores of the Grand. The purpose of that bridge and the multitude more or less exactly like it is to conduct people, completely unaware, through a transition. A transition between states, those states being existence on one side of the river or the other.
That this transition occurs without the involvement or even knowledge of the commuters disturbed me, and got me thinking about its cultural significance. It was only fifty years ago that bridges were ornate structures of lacy steel, their girders stretching from end to end in a beautiful collision of art and engineering. Travelers could see not only the structure itself, but also the obstacle they were traversing by simply looking off to the side. The transition from one side of the obstacle to the other was an integral part of the journey; the designers weren’t attempting to reduce the awareness of the transition itself.
Our culture and the people who comprise it seek to magically move between states of being, taking for granted the value inherent in applying effort to effect change. We would rather buy change ready-made and available on a store shelf or on the sales floor of a car dealership without ever needing to actively seek it out or to expend any of our own energy. We travel over bridges that are barely there, bridges that effortlessly conduct us from one side to the other with barely a bump in the road, bridges that don’t even allow us the opportunity to look around and take in the change in scenery, environment, and even ourselves.
The importance of transition lies not merely in its function of moving us from one state of being to another, but also in its ability to teach us about ourselves and how we react to dynamic situations. The transition is as important as the outcome, which is something we overlook when the destination, the goal, is the only thing we consider.
Or maybe I was just mad I couldn’t see the river.
