Bump

To escape the heat for just a moment, a man, dressed in a full suit, probably a lawyer, stepped out of the cattle herd flowing toward the turnstiles out of the McPherson Square metro station, and walked over to one of the giant circular fans whirring within its metal cage, trying to circulate air in the station. He stopped right in front of it, put down his briefcase, and tilted his head back. The fan blew across his neck, over his tilted cheeks and lifted the hair falling back from his forehead.

I watched him do this, and saw a pleased, satisfied smile settle into his face. For just one moment, he was breaking a pattern and mining a moment of delight out of a vein of possibility that most workmanlike prospectors did not even see. He knew it: this moment was there and he had found it.

Thud! I walked right into the retractable barrier that admits and releases passengers through the turnstile. Bouncing back a step, I reflexively swiped my metro pass over the sensor again, and the barrier opened before me. I laughed. Something about slips and falls and bumps strikes us as hilarious; no doubt there’s a theory of comedy to explain this. My own theory is that collisions and delight are both at the foundation of the material world: we imagine that atoms are things zipping around like inexhaustible billiard balls on an infinite table, colliding and crashing off in a new deflected direction every millisecond because that is just what makes sense to our notion of delight, even joy you might say, down at the deepest heart of things.