We leave each morning
carrying more
than anyone can see.
A name we must live up to.
A promise.
The cost of bread.
Something said yesterday
that travels with us still.
The road fills.
Behind every windscreen,
a life
someone going to work,
someone returning,
someone rehearsing words
they hope they will have
the courage to say.
For a little while,
we move beside one another,
close enough to see a face,
too far to know
what it has endured.
Then a turning separates us.
May they reach
whoever is waiting.
May there be kindness
where they stop.
And may we remember
that we, too,
are someone
worth waiting for.
There are days
we measure ourselves
by how much remains unfinished.
Even while resting,
we count.
Even beneath an open sky,
we carry the ceiling
of the room we left.
So much of living
becomes getting somewhere.
We pass a tree
without seeing it.
The light changes.
An afternoon is gone.
But sometimes,
between one place
and another,
we look up.
The buildings fall behind.
The road bends,
and a valley opens
where a moment ago
there was only stone.
Our eyes follow
the long slope of a mountain,
the scattered houses,
a field still holding sunlight.
In one of those houses,
someone is washing a cup.
Someone is growing older.
Someone has good news
and has reached for the phone.
Distance makes the houses small.
Inside them,
nothing is small
to the people who live there.
Their love.
Their worry.
The empty chair.
The ordinary meal
they will remember years from now.
We have never met,
yet there is so much
we would recognise.
The road keeps turning.
For a while,
we let the world arrive
without asking
what it can give us.
A patch of shade.
A bird above the hillside.
Clouds moving
at their own pace.
Our hands loosen.
A breath enters
without being hurried out.
Nothing has been settled.
There are still messages to answer,
work to return to,
people we miss.
Yet the light
has reached us here.
We cannot remain
at every beautiful window.
Soon there will be
another street,
another morning,
something that needs
our care.
Perhaps we can return
with a little more room
for the lives beside us.
Let someone finish speaking.
Ask the question
and wait for the answer.
Sit down to eat.
Notice the evening
before closing the curtains.
And when someone we love
comes through the door,
look up.
Let them feel,
for that moment,
that the journey can wait.
– Dr Haroon Rashid
