I love driving late at night, when there’s nothing to do but sleep and maybe watch something, a show or an old movie. It’s peaceful, the road sparsely populated, the world just a little bit less complicated, less overwhelming. When there isn’t anyone else on the road, it becomes less of an anxiety-inducing mission of getting from point A to point B, a complete free-for-all held together by rules and common sense, and yet held back as well from a sort of mundane, apathetic, and yet highly dangerous anarchy. However, late at night, or very early in the morning if ever you can truly separate the two, it becomes almost a form of meditation, a clearing of your mind so that you may rest easier, leaving behind the worries of the world and just concentrating, in a literal sense, on the road ahead.
At this time, even other people and our experiences with them become better. In the midday, strangers and their cars are so great in number and so distant in our minds that they eventually cease being individuals and form this massive obstacle, this incredibly anxious, time-wasting blob of metal and carbon known as “traffic”. At night, though, they become something less, and yet so much more. They become an individual, a stranger in the night with some unknown purpose and yet without judgement. What was once an obstacle and a super-villain in our everyday lives suddenly becomes a partner on the road, another person who has their own reason for being here, their own life story to tell full of both joy and heartbreak, and if put into the hands of a skilled enough storyteller, could be something I would actually want to read.

I always thought of this experience of realizing how little you truly know about the majority of people you see as something not many people get to have, as something that people with leather-bound journals and curly mustaches write about in poem form, but to my joyful amazement, this phenomenon is known as sondering, and it is brought about in its purest form, I realize, in the simple pleasure of sharing the road with a few treasured strangers. I only wish that it was always like that, where everyone could look at each other and see a whole person just like them, with inner lives as complicated as our own, just as crazy as we are and just as scared of that secret instability. But alas, we can’t continue on like that, knowing that everyone in the world is just like us, except different, that even those who suffer the most are also the ones who deserve it the least. So we go out at night, and we meet strangers and share the road with them for a bit, never speaking, never realizing that the closest we feel to the hidden world we share, is when we’re our most tired and unlikable, and in the most danger we ever intentionally place ourselves in.

Good night, and have a safe drive home