NY is in the midst of a transit strike.

The day when you have three back-to-back and important-to-you meetings.

In three distinct areas of the city.

All disctinct from the area you reside.

Somewhere Murphy is chuckling.

And after a brief moment of frustration I decided to join him.

 

Transit strikes are striking things.

In a city like Sydney, where I grew up, they barely touched me. Able to drive it was always possible to get use of a car/grab a ride in with friends. But NY is no car city. Precisely one of the reasons I love it so:  you walk everywhere; the subways connect you through most of Manhattan; taxi’s (at least for me) are for late nights and airports…

Until comes the day when you really need to be utilising the transport network.  And it doesn’t want to play.

I will admit I did try to break the system. I stood on the Street corner at 7:30am in a vain attempt to hail the elusive empty taxi.

A man actually giggled at me: "are you seriously trying to get uptown?".

I debated whether to hitchhike. 

Briefly.

I heard my frustration rise… 

And then I stopped: 

- nothing was that important! At least, not meetings and subways.

So there, on that street corner I stood stopped. And smiled.

Each day we  cross vast distances, distances that if individually journeyed by foot or messenger would be year(s)-long.

In real time we communicate and connect across continents, across time zones, across cultures and languages and…

In one day I speak to ‘tomorrow’ in Australia. Tonight in Amsterdam. Earlier in San Fran. Later to Wales. I fire flurries of emails uptown, downtown, crosstown, crossworld. I drive kilometers. Fly miles. I search for a particular line in a particular story in a particular book in a particular library.

All without the slightest thought for the distances I couldn’t cross in one individual day some 50years ago.

And at the same time, I saw that even though I have my laptop and my phone and my web cam and wiki and blog and…I still wanted to be face-face with the people I was scheduled to be meeting.

So there, on that street corner, I watched my annoyance float by.

In its place stood the magical world we live in.

A world where time and space mean something new. Yet a world where we still want to be in the presence of one another to feel connected.  A world where we still wanted, nay, needed, to ‘meet’.

And with that, I made three phone calls, grabbed a coffee and walked joyfully back home.

PS I would like thank the strikers for giving my the gift of perspective. And probably for keeping me a little fitter. But can you please turn the trains back on?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 4:48 am and is filed under action, musings, talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.