I was driving home a few days ago, along the curve of a congested highway bordered on both sides by neon signs and sad, empty storefront windows, watching cars weave in and out of blurred traffic lanes ahead of me. I was preoccupied, staring at the speedometer, cursing the driver in front of me and hoping that I would make it through the next traffic light. The trail of red tail lights extended ahead me into the horizon and I almost lost hope for my journey. My 20-minute drive is consistently made worse by inept drivers, stop and go traffic, and the incomprehensible frustration that is inherent in any kind of commute. Driving to and from the same place every day seems unnatural. We go somewhere only to return home later, and what have we accomplished? At times, I lose hope. Routine becomes routine and time slips away.

There exist eternal moments in life that transcend the boundaries of the ordinary, superficial lives we have created. They are a shimmering reminder that, in the midst of our confusion and egotistical delusions of importance, we are but a small piece of the world, and it moves with no concern of us. We believe that we cut a deep trail in the surface of the world, but the world has not yet noticed our existence, and will not even after we disappear. Things move over and around us and we hardly seem to notice their beauty. But sometimes, this beauty, evidence of the existence of a world is ours yet does not belong to us, becomes unexpectedly and stunningly clear.

As I surveyed the sea of stagnant traffic ahead of me, I did something unusual. I forgot about my frustrations, forgot about the three books I should have read that day, forgot that I was sitting in my car in the midst of rush hour traffic. I stopped and looked out the window and was reminded of the infinite possibilities that can exist if we only would allow them to find us.

The sky seemed to converge at the point where the trees are overtaken by the darkening shadow of clouds and everything was indistinguishable from everything else. This is an illusory time of day, when nothing is real. All things seem to slow to a fraction of their normal pace as shadows begin to crawl along sidewalks and roads, and the world the way I am used to seeing it shifts to an unrecognizable, muted image of itself. It’s chilling and wonderful. These times occur at transitions in the day, as the inky darkness of pre-dawn reveals, one inch at a time, the invisible landscape, and as dusk rolls across the sky, gently removing it again.

The darkening sky seemed to mirror my frustration, though I could still see flecks of orange and gold along the seams of the clouds, like they were turning their faces to the sun to acknowledge it before it set. Autumn sunsets are nearly ritualistic in their beauty, and unmatched by any natural phenomena I have ever seen. The chill in the air that lingers on your cheeks even after you stand in a heated room accents the blazing blend of colors on the trees and is reflected in the sky. For a moment, ever so brief and fleeting it always is, I felt the world surround me and let me in.

I turned my head up slightly to look out the window at the trailing wisps of cloud still hanging overhead, illuminated dark red by the quickly extinguishing sun, and saw one of my favorite sights in the world: a group of birds flying together in that way that makes them seem to twist the air around them into a blanket and fling it over the top of the sky. Moving as a unit, they dove towards a hedge of trees and then suddenly lifted up, as if by some signal, and maneuvered around again.

I’ve never felt as inadequate as I did sitting there in traffic, waiting for the mass of humanity in front of me to move so that I might start to make my way back to where I belonged. What I saw in the sky was a type of freedom that I can only dream of attaining. It was uninhibited and natural. The birds did not cease their flight when they returned back towards the tree, but continued up, circling higher into the sky until they were lost from sight.