Ordinary Moments

There’s a photo I keep coming back to lately. A red Ferrari racer, the old “breadbox” shape, seen from behind. Cold air. Soft exhaust cloud. People blurred in heavy coats, walking past, talking, not really looking. The car is just sitting there, engine breathing, waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet.

Every time I look at it, I feel myself slow down. What I love most is that nothing dramatic is happening. No flames. No heroic drift. No checkered flag. Just a small, ordinary moment: a machine at idle, a crowd half-distracted, a gray sky that could turn to rain or light at any second. On paper it’s nothing. In practice it’s everything.

Zen has this way of pointing to what’s already here instead of what we think should be here. The present moment is never dressed the way our minds want to see it. We picture victory laps and perfect sunsets. Life gives us cold mornings, exhaust breath, and a car that isn’t moving yet. The breadbox is not “on stage.” It’s not being worshipped. It’s just another body in the flow of the day. But if you really look, you can feel the weight of its history sitting quietly in the middle of that street. Years of design, hours of tuning, old races burned into the metal, names both remembered and forgotten.

There’s a Zen saying I think about when I see this: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The point is simple: we’re always tempted to look for magic in the big moments, but the truth of things is right here in the ordinary ones.

Before the race, after the race, in between seasons… this car is still only ever doing one thing: being exactly what it is. That’s harder for us humans. We don’t like “just being.” We want to be becoming. Becoming successful, becoming healed, becoming recognized, becoming something slightly more impressive than we were yesterday. Our minds turn moments into auditions. Even our rest starts to feel like a test we can pass or fail.

What if we borrowed a little from this breadbox instead? In the photo, the car isn’t trying to prove anything. It’s not explaining its lap times. It’s not begging people to notice its shape. It’s not jealous that someone in the crowd is looking at their phone or another car. It simply exists: paint, glass, rubber, noise, breath in cold air. And that existence is enough.