Some thoughts while riding in a small car hurtling along a ribbon of road

Riding in a car for 1600 miles gives you a lot of time to think. 

A lot.

Especially when the scenery is Kansas. Nothing changes. Nothing alters. You can take a nap for an hour, awaken, and assume you merely closed your eyes for a blink because everything looks exactly like it did when you fell asleep—endless fields in a 360 degree view, topped by a dome of sky. It is starkly beautiful and an apt analogy for eternity. But you are left alone with your thoughts because there will be little or nothing to catch your attention.

Even in the more undulating, shifting scenery of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and our home, Georgia, there is still time to sit with your own mind as the interstate unscrolls mile after mile. 

Most teachers of spirituality encourage solitude—intentional time away from all else to sit and think. It is in the silence, the stillness, and the loneliness that God finds free reign to speak clearly and distinctly. Maybe that’s why we keep the world so noisy—avoidance of God? What does God say in such moments?

Chelsea, bless her heart, did most of the driving from Denver to Augusta—she finds sitting so utterly boring as to be mind numbing to the point of being comatose. So I had a lots of miles to watch the world go by. 

It is amazing how many of us are on the move. Never did we roll along a section of interstate that was abandoned or lonely. Always there was a steady stream of travelers—the ubiquitous big rigs, but also people on business, families vacationing, folks trying to get to a reunion, funeral, or other event. There may well have been a few folks just driving. Human beings don’t sit still, do we? Most of us stay active. Most of us want the time busy. We want full schedules. We want interactions. We want connections. Stillness threatens lags. 

I noticed that even on the airplanes I took getting to Denver. Even there, no one just sits and looks out the window—in part because only the sanctified get window seats, and with modern seating charts, no one else can see the window, let alone look out it. So we fill the time with movies on our laptops, music on our earphones, books, even the desolate airline magazine, and one poor soul spent almost two hours with the safety diagram on the way to Colorado. Some folks fill the time by going to restroom. One little boy popped up about every eleven minutes or so, and, no, I do not think he had UT problems, I think he was bored, old enough to leave his seat by himself, so practiced his freedom to move for the whole flight. 

Another thing I noticed was a flattening of urban self-expression. It is true that Denver has its own vibe, Kansas City is a statement in its being, St. Louis has the arch, Paducah immediately lets you know you’re in Kentucky, and Nashville is stubbornly eccentric as Music City. But there was also an alarming sameness to the urban sprawls we passed through. For a while in Missouri, I had no idea where we really were—somewhere between Independence and St. Louis, but looking out the window offered no hints of even a town name, just the same billboards I see around Augusta, calling attention to Starbucks, Panera Bread, Target, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Ross, Marshalls, Costco, and so on. The shopping centers all looked exactly alike, so much so that I believe (although I do not know for sure) that strip malls must be packaged now by developers—we will drop a ten acre complex with these specific stores in place. So it would go, state after state, mile after mile—everything becoming more and more the same.

I enjoy finding funkiness along the way. Chelsea led me to some great neighborhoods in Denver and also briefly took me up into the Rockies on I-70 where 19th Century mining towns look like they did 150 years ago, although the mines don’t work anymore. The neighborhoods reminded me that Denver has a flavor that is its own, but now you have to scrape beneath the surface to find it. With the Target strip mall right at the exit, no one need venture deeply into town. Does that flattening carry over onto people? As we all eat our Panera kale salad that does not vary anywhere, having lunch after getting our necessaries at Target, and then grocery shopping at the new Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market for groceries arranged on the same aisles even if the stores are 750 miles apart so you can close your eyes far from home and still find your way—does that do something to us?

I wonder.

I wonder if that is why so many of us are drawn to hysterical cable news anchors who scream about everybody different from a mythical US. At least they tell us we are unique. At least they assure that there are indeed vast differences between us. They may then exploit that to do more harm than good, but at least they let us know variety exists. 

God painted with all the colors in the box. That revealed itself stunningly as the Rockies revealed themselves in stair step ridges, piling off to the west. That revealed itself as suddenly the ground undulated in Kansas as we crossed the Flint Hills. That revealed itself in the Plains thunderstorm that gloried in lightning and rain. That revealed itself in the panoply of people in the airport. 

And that is what I though about while left to think in a small car hurtling along a ribbon of road through seven states.