The Urban Pulse

Sometimes I get into these weird moments where I'm awed by what I see around me and the history, innovation, and culture buzzing around me. This usually occurs when I'm absurdly bored or otherwise unoccupied with anything of importance. The other day I was driving home from work on France Avenue from Edina back to my apartment in Saint Paul. The sun had long begun its daily slumber casting the area in shadow. The lights bathed the streets and headlights illuminated the spaces between the jam packed cars as tens of thousands tried to get home. I had my music on and I slowly inhaled and exhaled my stress from work away. I didn't have anywhere particular to be after work had wrapped up so I was in no hurry. But as I approached the overpass to take my exit to work, I saw that I-494 was a solid line of white lights coming towards me and a solid line of red lights going away from me. Rush hour had brought the highway to a crawl so I opted to take the frontage road and avoid the mess altogether. 

But something happened at this point. I had some weird moment of zen where I appreciated and shook my head at what I saw. I sat in my Nissan Sentra, who's steel was harvested from the Earth in a great number of places, or at the least recycled and shipped to great number of manufacturing plants, presumably some in Japan and in the United States where at one point it was assembled into some coherent vehicle. It ran on gasoline pumped from Canada and refined in the United States via a pipeline through northern Minnesota into Wisconsin. But, forget even the current stuff, just looking around me was amazing. Just 150 years ago, this was nothing... just a small fort of a few hundred people lay nestled high on the bluffs overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota River. And in a relatively short period of time, all the people, infrastructure, buildings, and economic activity necessary to get me to that point came together. The very highway I was driving over was not even in existence some 40 years ago. 

But then I thought about the things I couldn't see. Like the urban animal that is really hard to observe. How everything follows a pulse, from air traffic, to rush hour, breakfast and lunch rushes, even cell phone calls and Nielson ratings for tv shows. This city (as all others are) acted as a large organism, reminiscent of a fungus, generally immobile and absorbing resources. But the city gets even more complex in terms of its ability to send information, electricity, water, and sewage to the places they need to be. I say very impressive, even if common place at this point. 

I couldn't stop looking at the complexity there. I kept going further, looking at things that were not human created. Like basic chemical reactions. The combustion of fuel in our engines, the digestion of food, the conversion of CO2 and water into sugars and oxygen. This going around us all the time. The very chemicals in our blood working in unison, or sometimes at war. The ability for our blood to buffer swings in pH, how salt depresses the freezing temperature of water, or how a current excites electrons in neon atoms causing them to emit light as they return to their resting state (temporarily of course). 

But it doesn't even stop there! We have the cultural element... the family unit, the neighborhood, city government, state government, federal government and international politics. The complexity of human interaction is dizzying and hard to even grasp the big picture of anything. Thinking at this level only moves my mind to briefly think about the water cycle, nitrogen cycle, phosphorus cycle and many more. Weather, carbon-silicate recycling/plate tectonics, evolution, etc. And all of this occurs in just the right manner for the most part to sustain a semi-intelligent species. 

And yet again, the complexity doesn't stop there. Thats only on Earth. The chemical systems on other planets in our own solar system and the dynamics of the galaxy only make what I see seem so insignificant and special. 

This moment of zen came crashing down as I realized the idiot two cars in front of me was in fact NOT going into the left hand turn lane as he had originally indicated stranding myself and another car in the middle of the intersection where an offramp unloaded. We managed to force the offramp cars to wait an entire cycle for the street lights. This irritated me and I got off the road and went to the Mall of America....

I bought a jacket for $17 on sale. It was originally $78. I forgot all about the complexities of the universe and thought to myself...

"Damn, I look good in this".