It’s not enough.

Description

It’s not enough. Friday morning on the bus to downtown. The air froze overnight but the high today will be 53 degrees Fahrenheit, so we are dressed in layers as the bus slowly fills to capacity over the course of its 40 minute journey down the major thoroughfare named after a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and missionary, who explored this part of North America almost 200 years ago. Here I am, in 2019, ushered along from home to school to home to work and back again and again for over a decade. Stretches of this road were once an Old Indian trail from Saint Anthony Falls to Bde Maka Ska used for thousands of years before any of my ancestors set foot on this half of the globe. Though I follow the same trail our journeys here are not alike. For them it was enough but for me? It’s not enough.

It’s not enough. All that we are doing to get by, to make the future happen today, again, just like it did yesterday and the day before that and the week before that and the month before that and the year before that and it’s still not enough. Before that there was the financial crisis and before that there was the war and before that there was another financial crisis and before that there was another war and before that it wasn’t enough. Not enough. Not enough land conquered. Not enough profits earned. Not enough jewels seized. Not enough gold plundered. Not enough slaves shackled. It’s not enough.

It’s not enough. Not enough to stop the inevitable, the creeping fate I know to be immanent. Another beautiful sunrise on the bus-ride to work, how quaint, how precious. I look around to try and notice these faces that someday I may never see again. These people who’s space I share in silence day after day as we parade in bus after car after bus to work a job to make money to pay for the life we live all together at the same time right here along this jagged line in the earth. All of this time, all of this effort, all of this. It’s not enough.

It’s not enough. This is the mantra. Not enough to make up for my sins. Not enough to right the wrongs of history. Not enough to correct my mistakes. Not enough work done, not enough time spent, not enough wisdom achieved, not enough knowledge gained. This is the mantra. It’s just a sunrise, a temporary optical reflection of light through water vapor, even the moment itself a statistical probability based on the number of bus rides taken during the sunrise, and a picture of a sunrise at that, like the thousands of pictures of sunrises published online every day. Only after our technology crumbles like sand through our fingers and the atmosphere has been ripped from the planet as the sun expands to a red giant, only then will the final sunrise come as Earth is swallowed up by our star. I said it before, I’ll say it again. This is the mantra. It’s not enough.

The Original

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