Cairo pot holes

Life is a series of endings and new beginnings. We are in a continual transition between stages of life. We experience things, meet people, feel pain, feel joy, feel confusion but we always feel. And, things ultimately happen that wake us up, shake us up and set us on the right course.

Sometimes the meanings that surround us feel overwhelming so we try to blank them out. At other times things appear so mundane that we try to blank them out. And when we’re in this ‘blanked out state’ our insight and perception is turned down very low; like we only hear the echoes and messages of life from a far distance. And so we continue until something jolts us back to reality.

For me, life has many ways of rousing me from my self-preserving reveries. I tend to often tune out of things and just drift because when I look around me I see dull (some would say ugly) concrete buildings, poor people, people grasping and hurrying for the necessitates of life, people driving in posh cars with an air of arrogance, joyful carefree people (very few) or people just tuned out like me. And, so I continue in my comfortable blankness until Cairo throws one of its many humungous pot holes in the way of my very tired-looking car.

Sparky (yes, even my car has a name) is only three years old but already ‘he’ looks much older. In fact, people could easily think he is neglected and unloved, but that is so untrue. It’s just that he has to battle through, up, down and over Cairo roads every single day and so gets bumped around, lurched around, and sometimes even spun around as he is maneuvered around, in and through Cairo traffic. So between dodging the cars, buses, taxis (we have three kinds now), donkey carts, people-pulling carts, bicycles, low-powered motorcycles and high-powered motorbikes as well as evading the odd police officer that stops cars for random checks, beloved car and blanked-out driver have a lot of work to do.

It is easy to feel rather smug after having successfully driven through traffic that moves along as tightly as my old gran’s knitting. Then feeling the breeze, the content of having ‘made it’ through yet another traffic jam, and the chaos that rules life in dusty old Cairo, life just jars me back to reality, reminding me how truly insignificant I really am in the scheme of things. A pot hole, one albeit massive pothole, can really ruin my day.

It’s not just the crunching of the back wheels, the strain on the axle, or the blow to the shock absorbers, it’s a stark reminder that I, who a minute ago was so sure of myself, didn’t see it coming. It’s a threat to my fast-eroding comfort zone; my ability to survive in Cairo.