The traffic’s always busy here. I can see ahead to the lights, unchanging, and know it will be a while. Nowhere to go, nowhere to move to, nothing to do. The busyness of the day, its frustrations irritations, its too many things to do and not nearly enough time, its rushing to get through things and your head birling and bursting with messages and conversations, slowly, very slowly, start to unwind.
Then:
Some combination of the time of the day, the angle of the sunlight, the point in the year, the spot where I’m stuck in traffic, some combination means the late September sunlight is streaming through the driver window.
I feel its warmth.
I feel bathed in it.
For just a moment, just the time it takes for those traffic lights to turn, I am bathed in the warmth of this golden late September light.
It warms me. It softens me.
The busyness of the day is gone, forgotten. Petty irritations, frustrations, gone, forgotten.
This is it, this is the moment of the day.
Just for a moment, for the time it takes for those traffic lights to turn, I am the person who is bathed in this golden warmth of late September sun.
I am warmed, softened, grateful. I am stuck in traffic, softened grateful, warm, human, here.
I do not know what grace looks like. But I think perhaps it feels like this. The sudden kiss of warmth when you’re sitting in traffic, enough to melt the grip of busy, enough to bring you: here.