This is kinda silly and obvious in some ways, but the other day I was really struck by a simple fact I’d never considered: All the roads are really one road…
I live on Bryker Dr, and it dead ends
into 34th street on one end and 30th on the other. So I think of this as a singular, discrete street that is 4 blocks long, and a couple car lengths wide. That’s how most people think they’re thinking about it.
But actually we’re all thinking of it as something much greater than that, we just don’t always realize we are. The street is my access to the rest of the world—and it is concretely (pun intended) connected to every other street in North America.
So is it really my street,
or is it one giant system? My finger is obviously a finger, and obviously doesn’t exist separately from my body. If I were dismembered, it wouldn’t be my
finger for very long, would it?
I think this is a beautiful metaphor for a self. We usually think we’re thinking of ourselves like we do roads, with beginnings and endings. But we’re actually the entire system, wholly interconnected with every other part. Getting from a small street in Austin to a small street in Winnipeg takes a long time, but in some incredibly real and grounded sense, there’s no separation between them.
( technically minus a few old roads that maybe don’t have any connections, but c’mon )