In the mornings, I often sit with some coffee and survey the traffic on the nearby highway, watching people trying to get to wherever they are going for whatever reasons. They are, of course, in a hurry.

They are, of course, not going anywhere fast in traffic.

It’s cyclic. The government has paid people to pay people to build an overpass not far away, spending 500 million Trinidad and Tobago dollars as far as the public knows. Nobody claims to actually want it other than the government. It’s supposed to alleviate traffic, I suppose, yet when it rains, the nearby highway floods and causes traffic anyway. And it will cause traffic with the overpass that they are building too.

Yesterday, I found myself in traffic coming back from the grocery store. I got stuck for 45 minutes in what normally only takes me 7 minutes or so to get home, so I stopped for lunch, surveyed the traffic, and spent another 20 minutes getting home, surrounded by people standing still yet… in a rush.

The clock won’t stop. A pulse of a heart that doesn’t belong to you can drive yours into overdrive pushes nutrients past you as fast as they move toward you, away from you as fast as they get to you, and there is no pause.

Yet you can take one.