While walking around downtown at lunch time and on the way to the train station, I often notice how the hurried businesspeople barrel down the streets leaning forward as though it will somehow get them to their destination a few seconds quicker. Sometimes I catch myself doing this as well.

When I drove to work, there was a very close equivalent in the drivers who would speed past a car that was slowing down for the red light in order to get to the light a few seconds sooner. It wasn’t even about the destination itself, really; it was this almost visceral urge to continue moving ahead as quickly as possible.

This sort of intense, singleminded focus on sheer forward movement reminds me of an image from a novel  by Charles Williams that I read years ago. This one character is having a sort of mental breakdown, and has a dream or vision in which, among other things, he sees a clock whose hands are spinning dizzyingly forward as though rushing to their own end.

Sometimes, when I’m walking in the midst of one of those crowds that has developed that hurry instinct, and is tripping over itself trying to get to its end without experiencing any present whatsoever, I feel like just stopping right in the middle and standing still—just standing there and doing nothing.

Who says you can’t stand still in a city?