On the Freeway

While sitting for meditation this morning – a relatively new practice for me, having mastered the sitting if not the meditating – I focused my attention on the sound coming in from my bedroom window. Even in the dark, early weekend morning, I could hear the steady flow of cars on U.S. 101.

If I’m to believe Google Maps, 101 is a football field away from my house. I never thought it possible that I’d choose to live so close to a freeway, but when I found my house seven years ago everything else about it beckoned, and so proximity to a freeway fell off the deal-breaker list.

I quickly got used to the sound, not noticing it except when I made the transition from the double-paned indoors to the low roar of the outdoors. I can’t call it white noise – that would be too clean. The sound is intimately tied to the perpetual soot deposits I regularly have to remove from the exterior of my house. I’d describe it more like waves of momentum made up of distinct tones coming in at random times.

My relationship with the freeway that creates this sound is complicated. I use it daily to get to work, and I’m grateful that I can get on and off it in three minutes and not be forced to sit in San Francisco traffic. Some nights I look out my upstairs window, high above the freeway, and I take in the beauty of the snaking white and red lights, slowly moving their way to someplace else.

But when I’m part of that creeping procession, watching the minutes before I need to be somewhere tick down to zero and then start climbing up as they become the minutes I’m late, I curse the clogged artery I’m dependent on. Although I do what I can to not contribute to the soot problem, there’s no fix yet for the increasing demands the freeway makes on my time.

To counter the stress of this commuting-heavy life, I’ve incorporated meditation into my morning routine. If I had more time – or maybe if I just had more inclination – I’d take myself to the beach on weekends and watch the surf. It’s only five miles away, and I’m sure the relentless power of the Pacific would realign me in some way.

But the pull of an ongoing to-do list keeps me close to the roadways that take me to places where I can check off an item, so I compensate by putting meditation on the list. And as I sit, tuning in to the sound that’s always there, I try to realign with what’s at hand. The freeway – my ocean.