I guess you've all had those moments you wish you could record and relive again and again. I had one of them in a very unexpected place and time.

I had had an evening with friends, I am in a car home and my friend is driving. I am tired, I have a headache and my stomach is upset. I'm in the passenger seat and there's nothing for me to do but to sit the time out, staring through the grimy, cracked windshield out at the darkness. We're driving along one of the most boring roads I know, just one lane straight ahead for an hour with nothing to see but the concrete barriers on both sides of the lane, and trees and overpasses and the occasional building. There's a dip under a viaduct and I see an electrical substation on the side of the road.

The scene is lit by naked grimy lightbulbs and striplights, shining on the filthy steel, grimy concrete and dirty asphalt. Everything so caked in grime it's brownish grey. It's all naked and ugly and raw and nobody cares because this is just a place you go past as you're driving to something or from something. I, my friend, and everyone around us is passing between experiences.

But it somehow strikes me that we're all here, now, experiencing this. This is life too. And these people that I can't even see but can assume to be in the cars, they are people like me. They see through their eyes and think thoughts in their heads. They, too, are life.

We had watched a movie, and movies are about tragedies, about amazing dramatic things, explosions and weddings and great accidents at sea, but life isn't just those things.

Life is also being in a dirty car being driven by a guy you've known for thirty years, driving past an electrical substation you've driven past so many times you've lost count. That's life too.

I've driven past that ugly substation so many times and I never really cared about it. And that's fine too. You don't need to care about everything in life.

Sometimes I like to care about what I care about and why and for some reason caring about an ugly electrical substation made me feel at peace with myself and the world.