You’re Allowed To Stand Still

Alex Iby.jpg

We’re always going. From beds to coffee shops, to offices, places and spaces that constitute fragments of our sustenance. To crawling cars at half past four. To homes that take us back at the end of it. To dinner tables. To beds. To all of it. All over again.

Stuck in this constant grind. Moving towards our perceptions of success. Of satisfaction in a world that looks like it might move past us if we’re half past it. If we aren’t doing everything we think we’re meant to be doing. If we don’t get out of the bed to begin with.

And most times that’s part and parcel of our our own internal movement to something greater. Understanding and chasing our dreams and aspirations – even on the mornings we rather not.

But sometimes we can’t really do that.
Sometimes we can’t really go.

Maybe ‘can’t’ isn’t the right word. Because parts of us know that we have in the past. Because parts of us want to with every fibre that makes them, them. Because we’ve been told that the world doesn’t know the word “can’t” – that it moves on without us. That we can’t be left behind.

Maybe there is no right word that truly encapsulates those moments of apparent immobility. Because they feel exactly like that. Like drinking out of empty coffee mugs. Like the cars crawling. Like standing still in a world that moves past us.

But everything that surrounds us exists irrespective of us.

We are our own microcosm of a universe.

Made of everything that makes us. Of action and inaction. Of mobility and immobility. Of moments.

And in those moments when we stop to breathe, when we stand still to take in the world that surrounds and lives within us, we find our own little coffee shops.

Each facilitating parts of our own unique journey. Each making that next step that much greater. Each forming our own internal satisfaction.

Each and every one of them shaping our own microcosm of a universe. All over again.

Written By: Hudson Biko

Photograph: Alex Iby

Previously published by Thought Catalog at www.thoughtcatalog.com.

Taxi Musing

img_40911

I was sitting in the car, eating the banana he bought me.

he bought two
but i can only assume
he wasn’t too
hungry
because he gave me the bigger one.

I never asked for it. I never even said I was hungry. But he gave it to me.
And in return, all I could say was the customary thank you.

He didn’t know it but that was my first meal of the day. Created out of
an instantaneous interaction from a succession of unpredictable actions.

In a myriad of other realities, I could have been anywhere else or with anyone else. But I wasn’t. In its own way, the universe conspired to put me exactly where I was meant to be. With exactly who I was meant to be with.

Sometimes, that is all there is. A collation of ‘random’ moments and actions morphing into exactly what we need.

© Hudson Biko

Thank You Stephen! 🙂