Well hello there, SF0. Its been a while.
I've been trying to get back into this game for a long time. I've got half a dozen half finished tasks, as well as several completely written up praxis that I just never hit the submit button on. At some point I just became paralyzed, unable to move forward, stopped in the tracks by a self-conscious need for perfection. What I've needed was a way to jump back into the game without thought of epic-ness, or doing something amazing. What I needed was a task that took me completely out of control, something that I could just sit back and let happen, for which no amount of planning or scheming could affect the outcome. This is that task.

I headed out on Tuesday morning, and biked down to an intersection I thought might have some action. I chose the corner of Madison and Michigan Ave, in downtown Chicago.


I plopped myself down on the corner of the intersection for 5 hours, from 11AM to 4PM and waited for something amazing to happen.  I took a photo of the intersection every time the East/ West light changed, one photo every 3 minutes, for 5 hours. 

Did money fall from the sky? No. Did someone turn into a superhero and rescue a small child running into traffic? No. Did a huge party erupt complete with firecrackers and nudity? I'm afraid not.  In fact, there was such a cacophony of noise, ceaseless traffic and honking, children screaming and laughing as they played in the fountain behind me, hundreds of conversations between people on the street or between people and their cell phones, that I could not even overhear a single specific conversation that may have struck me as fantastic.  There was noise and movement without interruption, constant stimulation of nothing in particular.

Did something fantastic happen? Yes.

When I was I child, living in a place much much more rural than my current residence of Chicago, there were not a lot of stimulating things like people or big buildings or exciting intersections. But one thing we did have was an immense night sky full of endless darkness and stars. When I was feeling down, in my younger years, I would go out into the night and stare up at that sky, taking in the vastness of the universe, remembering how very small I was. I would try to wrap my head around the concept of the earth, filled with more people I could ever imagine living lives I couldn't understand, and in my smallness I would start see the smallness of my own problems. In realizing how little my life meant in the great big world, I would feel powerful to do anything I wanted to do.

It has been a long time since I felt that sort of understanding of the vastness of the world, but on that street corner I felt it again.  There I was, in the middle of a Tuesday, on just one street corner of just one city on this planet. And everywhere I looked, throngs and throngs of people endlessly went about their lives. And inside each one of their heads was a whole universe onto itself of hopes and fears and imaginings. I may have been witnessing hundreds of fantastic things every minute, perhaps an epiphany or lovers meeting for the first time or someone's last words to a family member on their cell phone.  The possibilities were endless. There was so much that I could never know or experience, so much world out there.

Sitting on that corner for hours, photographing these people, not a single one paid me any attention.  I was merely a speck of dust so miniscule that my existence was the equivalent of nothing.  And in that smallness I felt the freedom that comes with knowing how unimportant I am. I felt the power to be whoever I want to be that comes with knowing how ridiculous it is to take myself so seriously.