I was thinking about this as I drove to work, and home again, one
day last week. It was another smog alert day in Toronto, and breathing
was nearly as hazardous to one's health as the alternative. But I
repeated it, my mantra for the day, as I practiced breathing, and
paying attention. Letting come and letting go.
One of the ways I've learned to improve my attention skills, and
also to reduce stress, is to imagine that I know the strangers I look at,
and to imagine their story. I started doing this in restaurants. My
imagination sometimes gets the better of me, but it's a useful
exercise. It forces you to focus, to pay attention to the details, to
look for hints to the story behind the face, to connect the dots.
The country road that comprises the first half of my morning
commute, and the last half of my return trip, takes me from the
protected green belt where I live to the edge of the relentless
suburban sprawl. As I enter the construction zone, with depressing
subdivision rezoning billboards on every farmer's field, the traffic
bunches up and slows to a crawl behind a cement mixer and gravel truck.
On the right side of the road stands an old man who has just collected
the mail from his mailbox, on the opposite side of the street from his
house. He waits, patiently at first, for some driver to stop and let
him cross back. He wears work pants with suspenders, and a checked
green flannel shirt over his gaunt, frail frame. He looks tired, worn
out, hunched over with a cane in one hand.
And then suddenly he loses it. He starts waving his cane
menacingly at the drivers that are passing by, ignoring him as if he
were invisible, and the look on his face becomes one of pure rage. I
imagine him as having once farmed the land now barren and crisscrossed
with the tire tracks of construction vehicles. I imagine him having
sold the land when, facing high property taxes and hopelessly low prices
from buyers of his produce or grain, he received an offer from a big
developer that he couldn't refuse. They'd allowed him to continue to
work the land, now their land, for a salary until the city had reached its edges and plans of subdivision had been approved.
And now, with no land to farm, he has become useless. Invisible.
Nothing to do but wait for busy people with destinations to whiz by,
and watch his land become another indistinguishable tract of crowded
starter homes. In this imagined context, I understand his rage, and I
stop for him. He doesn't smile, or even acknowledge me. He just
shuffles back across the road to his house.
Breathe, I tell myself.
When I reach the highway, the shiny electronic toll road built for
those in a hurry, those with expense accounts, I stay in the third of
the four lanes, the designated 'slow lane' for vehicles traveling a
mere 70 mph. Up ahead, in the fourth lane, is one of the trucks I
always dread seeing, the silver-sided tractor-trailers full of small breathing
holes, used to take animals to slaughter. I sigh. I want to turn away,
to hope or pretend that it is empty. But I have to look, and of course
it is not empty. Squashed up against the holes are the pink bodies of
pigs, stacked three levels high. Breathe. Most of them are facing inward, it appears -- the
noise of the highway at rush hour is deafening and bewildering, and
perhaps they prefer to look at each other. But near the front, I can
make out, through the pattern of holes, one animal facing out towards
me.
I want to close my eyes, imagining an imploring, terrified,
desperate look on this animal, who, like over 90% of farmed animals,
has probably lived his sad, monotonous life in the crowded stench of a
feedlot. But as my car inches slowly by, the look I see on his face is
instead more one of excitement. His expression says: "At last, something new, something important is going to happen." His look is one of expectation,
almost rapture. Pigs are intelligent animals, at least as smart as dogs
and cats, and I picture the truck full of fattened pets, ceded by the
local pound, and sigh. I am smiling and crying at the same time. Breathe.
As I pull even with the cab of the truck I look at the driver. A
middle-aged South Asian man, he looks much sadder than his charges. He
knows that his sentence is a long way from being over. This will not be
his final, eventful journey. He wears a uniform, anonymous,
obedient. He looks weary. I imagine him having come to this country,
young and full of expectations, only to discover that his credentials
are not recognized here, his skills not wanted. In a strange land, with
others to support, in a culture he does not understand, with an accent
that makes it hard for others to understand him, he has had to find a
job, any job. He has done what he had to do, and this terrible work is
it.
Breathe.
Returning home the same afternoon, I watch a Korean woman walking
her young daughter home from school. The neighbourhood I'm driving
through is a strange mix of Korean and Persian people, with most of the
store signs in one of these two languages. My knowledge of Korean
culture, other than the Hollywood version portrayed on the Gilmore
Girls, is negligible. There are few clues in the faces of the woman and
the girl, both of whom move quickly down the street, the girl's hand
tightly gripped in her mother's, both with faces lowered.
But in the woman's face I see signs of great resolve and pride
that remind me of my own mother's grim determination to make a life
here for her family after her young immigration. I imagine the Korean
woman's momentous struggles: to do what she must, coming from a
patriarchal culture where women were obedient and stayed at home, to a
multicultural 'consumer' society where women are encouraged to be
independent and two-income families are an economic necessity. Her
dress, and her daughter's, are practical, modest and non-descript,
almost like cloaks of invisibility designed for security in a world
where dangers must seem incessant and inexplicable. Like that of so
many immigrants, the culture they seem to represent is frozen in time,
a culture that is disappearing back in their homeland while it is being clung to so
fiercely by refugees in this rootless new world.
And while the daughter's face is dutiful and obedient it is also
restless and resentful: At some point, like a bone or muscle stretched
too far in one direction, she is going to crack, to rebel, perhaps
violently or self-destructively. Her expression says that if Michelle
Wie can
turn heads with her attire and thumb her nose at convention while
burning up the LPGA at age 15, why can't every girl find a new way, a different way, free from the
suffocating culture that seems a drab anachronism in a world of
breathtaking possibility.
Breathe.
That thought, of cultures lost and found within larger dissonant
cultures, stays with me until I am once again out of the city, where
grey has given way to green and industrial smells to natural ones. And
then, as I pull into a left-turn lane, I am shaken by the sight of two
dead animals, fresh roadkill. They are the corpses of two raccoons, an
adult and, beside and just behind it, a baby. The adult's body
is angled, curled towards the baby's. The story I imagine of their
demise is one I cannot bear, and I have to pull over to the side of the
road, beneath the trees, and weep.
Breathe. Deep, long, gasping.
There is no difference between a deep breath and a sigh. Breathe.
Focus. Pay attention. Practice. There is so much work to do, and we
must be ready, capable. Just breathe, until we know what to do next.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
