Along for the Ride

My commute to work takes about 30-45 minutes – time which is generally spent kick starting the gray matter. This morning I pondered the complexity vs. the simplicity of life. How much of our lives are really under our own control? How much is the product of our interaction with other’s lives? Driving my car along the road I have the power to speed up, change lanes, whatever I want to do so long as it does not interfere with the rest of the cogs in the wheel. That seems simple enough. The complicated part is how all the individual pieces fit together in the big puzzle of life. If the car travelling in the opposite direction were to come across the median into my lane of traffic – our individual worlds would collide. In some respects it would seem that we are all living our lives on parallel universes, and that our actions belong to each of us individually. In a micro-view of the world, that may be true. On a bigger scale, our actions do affect those around us. I am a small cog in the big wheel of life – insignificant, while at the same time integral. Am I in control of my own cog individually, or am I turned by the other cogs that are intertwined with mine? Alas I must acknowledge that for the most part I am just along for the ride in the big wheel.