A man in his mid­forties sat outside during his lunch break on a brick wall overlooking a
man­made lake in the Chicago Loop. The air was peculiarly stagnant on that day in the Windy City central business district, so he decided he would sit alone outside and enjoy the fall air. The lounge was getting tiresome; the constant pressure to make trivial conversation with his co­workers had begun to ruin his appetite. Even small talk about the weather with his fellow male workers always held a hint of competition. He would say something like “It’s not very windy out today” and sense that he was being scoffed at­­ all because he made that simple observation before anyone else could. The man had never been much of a competitor anyways, and he held a secret that none of those other guys knew: his passion for physics.
When he was a high school kid and took his first physics course, he dreamt of becoming a physics professor. He loved the subject deeply and his strongest desire was to spread that passion to others. But, coming from a family in a poor financial situation, it was a blessing that he even got to finish his bachelor degree. The man was so in debt after those first four years that he decided his dream, which required a PhD, could wait. Now there he was, in his mid­forties, working the same incessant job every day of his life. Most of the time he hadn’t an idea of what his purpose was, other than to blindly follow the orders of higher­ups in an office on a higher floor of the building than he. He was just another nameless, faceless man caught up in the uniform circular motion of the Chicago business district.
He was in a rush out of the house that morning, as usual, and hastily put together a lunch. He realized the only sandwich­ fillers in the entire house were peanut butter and jelly.
?That irked him. Then he realized he had left his lunchbox at work, and there was no type of plastic or paper bag to be found. So, there he sat, on a brick wall overlooking the “uniquely modern” mirrored office building (which was really just a replica of all of the other office buildings surrounding it), eating a soggy PB&J out of his daughter’s pink and purple M?y Little Pony lunchbox from last school year. Oh, he got some looks from the other guys in his building when he pulled out that pink and purple prize from his locker. That’s when he decided to sit outside: when he could no longer stand their c***y scoffs.
As he sat in the fall air, he observed thousands of strangers following their daily routine around him, sometimes registering his pink lunchbox as a mere afterthought. A peculiar kind of feeling washed over him. His eyes rested ahead on the circular revolving entrance doorway to his sleek office building. Past the impatient, stressed­out heard, he noticed that the door never ceased its revolving. It was the picture of a uniform circular motion, he thought. That door should have appeared in his old physics textbooks. It was amazing and terrifying how that door never ceased. In and out, suit after suit. The suits traveling ‘round and ‘round through that door were all the same bleak grey and the faces of the men wearing them were indistinguishable from one another. He wondered why that door never stopped turning: it was an eerie question. He tore his eyes from the door and towards a bigger scene. The man stood on the brick wall where he had been eating his PB&J and looked out across the business district to which he commuted every day of his adult life. The whole area was circular in shape. The brick wall on which he stood surrounded the circular man­made lake in the center of the district. As far as he could see around that lake, men and women in grey suits were rushing around and around at the same speed: the speed that says “I have somewhere to be”. He stood still like the eye of a storm, and his mind went into a frenzy as he realized they were all the same. They were all being pulled around that lake and through those circular revolving doors by a sort of centripetal
?force: a force which pulls people from their straight and separate paths in life and forces them into this routine life­­ a force which molds everyone into an indiscernible human mass of industry and logic. This force wasn’t of its own being, but it was so large that the man felt crushed trying to fathom what could possibly cause it. “Society” seemed too vague a word. Some deep set of morals, employed out of his reach of mind, had started the centripetal force which sent those Chicago citizens on their busy, routine paths.
He sat down and averted his vision from the revolving door and down towards his glossy, office­ shoe clad feet. He felt a sense of urgency as he wondered how many times he had traveled the circumference of that lake, blindly walking to and from his despised, mundane job. The man had met his wife in his twenties and decided that a job like that was necessary if he wanted to support a family. He was overcome by an overwhelming sense of despair when it sunk in that he, himself, had become inept in the face of that nameless but omnipresent centripetal force: he had let himself succumb to decades of living in a uniform circular motion, like everyone else around him. He was somewhere in his mid­forties and had never went back to school, and his dreams of becoming a physics professor had been shoved into a deep crevice of his mind. Always wake up. Always commute. Always work. Always provide. Always live for others. Never think of yourself. Never succumb to unrealistic dreams. Never stray from this circular pattern. ‘Round and ‘round we go. He felt dizzy. He tightly grasped the brick wall at each side of his thighs. He was baffled that the centripetal acceleration had been pushing so strongly against him that he had not been allowed to feel it. He slipped out of his dreams, day in and day out, becoming a completely different person from which he had wished to be when he was younger, and he acceleration of the crowd against him was so strong that trying to recognize it would be useless. He could fight, he could change directions, but he would always be traveling in a circle.
He remembered his lunch box: a pink and purple blob of paint on a grey covered canvas. It was small, but it was something. With a hint of relief, he decided that he would bring that lunch box with him to work every day from then on. Maybe he could summon up the strength to push out of that circular mold, to walk down a straight path again. He understood that lunchbox, that pink and purple treasure of his daughter’s, was the first step out of the circular mold. Even if he couldn’t fight his way out of the ordinary life he led, at least he had these three things: a knowledge of the uniform circular motion, a desire to stray from it, and a pink and purple ?My Little Pony?lunchbox.