The sphinx of the seashore

All of the earthbound animals, only man elects to travel faster that his legs can move. It is speed that takes us away from the journey to the center of ourselves. It seems to me that the faster we go, the more jaded we become. The boredom mounts; we respond with still more speed. At sixty miles per hour, we lose all sense of where we are going and who we are. We step down harder on the pedal, hoping to find the missing person somewhere down the road. At seventy, eighty, ninety miles per hour, we plunge headlong over a precipice and kill ourselves.

How many appointments can we keep in a single day? How many sights and sounds can we absorb before we go completely out of our minds? We admire motion, abhor stillness, treat the reflective person with disdain. I don’t have time to sit around contemplating my navel, the man of action likes to say, never thinking that the umbilicus in the center of his being, the point of nourishment that connects him to his future and his past.