The Meaning of Mowing in an Indifferent Universe

Today I’m traveling: the modern miracle of waking up in one country and falling asleep in another. It does make for a weird in between sort of day.

I saw some of my oldest friends on this trip and actually had a fair amount of time for a good conversations with each of them. It’s good to check in with who I was and who I’ve become, and to see who they are and who they’ve become. I was really lucky to have met such interesting people when I was so young.

We also got lucky with the eclipse yesterday. The clouds dispersed for the whole period of totality. Someone in my family made a rather silly comment about how ‘only city people want to watch an eclipse because they’re looking for things to do, while country people have so much to do that they can’t be bothered’. There were no end of things I could have responded to with that, but settled on ‘I like how it reminds me of our minor, minuscule place in the universe, and I don’t think that has anything to do with city or country people.’ That said, some guy kept mowing his lawn through the whole thing.

I don’t get it. Are people so blasé as to think that something so unusual, so rare (not for Earth, but in a particular spot) is just another media frenzy? Or something invented by city folks to fill up their days? What ever happened to wonder? Why is beauty something you pay an admission fee to go see in a museum? When did chores take the place of putting ourselves in our place in an indifferent universe? Will that person remember mowing his lawn one spring day or the day the total eclipse passed over his head?

I think it’s the opposite. Country folks have chores to fill up their days but the chores don’t give meaning to their lives. The whole idea of ‘meaning’ is just a thing for city folks, because ‘we country folk have to get that lawn mowed’.

Having written that, it’s the saddest thought I’ve had in a very long time. Emptiness is everywhere, and our lives are filed with memes and washing the dishes, worming livestock and gallery openings, cat videos and mowing, and for many people there’s not a meaningful moment to be had.

I can’t say that I have any answers, traveling around with a stuffed cow and once a year conversations with some of the people who matter most to me, but at least the hint of a question is in my brain somewhere.

Just one more thought: watch a bird sometimes. They land, bob around maybe, pick at something or chirp a bit, then they fly off. And no one can figure out why they landed where they did, or why they flew away. I just feel like we’re all doing the same thing as that bird for most of our lives, and our time here could be so much more meaningful if we’d just take some time to stop (mowing, scrolling, flitting around like a sparrow) to just be.