The Tale of the Debit Cards

Finding symbols to ground a life, attentiveness as prayer, etc.

“Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration…dwelling requires duration.”

- Byung-Chul Han

My rear, passenger side tire has a slow leak. This has created a sort of ritual for me in the form of a once a week trip to an air pump at a local gas station. I pull up, I Tap-to-Pay, the loud grinding of the pump erupts, I unscrew the valve, pump for 15-20 seconds, and away I go.

The other day though, I noticed something weird at the air pump. This particular machine, maybe you’ve seen the type, had two components. One contained the pressurized air mechanism and the other’s purpose I’m not really sure. Maybe pressurized water? Doesn’t matter.

They were both bolted to the cement with about a two-inch gap between them. As I paid for my air, my eyes became fixed on the space between the two pumps and caught sight of something. Squatting down, I saw tucked within that two-inch sliver of space, four or so debit cards. Filed away in this tiny gap between machinery.

Feeling like I was seeing something that maybe I shouldn’t be seeing, I didn’t touch or investigate further. I didn’t see what names were on the cards. I thought about reporting it, but to who? There seemed an obvious intention to them being there. One card would be an anomaly. Two… weird, but still possibly just by chance. But the 3-5 that were tucked in there? At that point, it seemed there was purpose to the pattern.

The tire got filled and I rode off. But the thought of the debit cards lingered. At a board meeting I had that night, someone prompted the group check-in with an ice breaker called “high, low, buffalo” — something good, something bad, and something random. When it came time for my buffalo, I told the debit card story. The room was equally puzzled.

My wife and I had busy days the day of the debit cards, so it wasn’t until the following evening while walking our dog that I told her about them. She was also confused.

Days have gone by. I’m still trying to make sense of it. What were they doing there? The most simple explanation is that someone paid for their air, left the card on the machine while pumping, forgot to grab it before driving off, and the next user simply tucked it away in a more non-descript spot for the owner to come back and find. But for that to happen 3-5 times? Seems odd.

It is October, spooky season, so my mind also can’t help but draw out a more sinister take. Is this some sort of strange ring of illicit activity? The air pump card drop a tactic for the exchange of payment method? Someone leaves a stolen or fraudulent card at the pump, someone else picks it up, taking their pick and, with identity hidden, can make purchases under the shroud of secrecy?

Perhaps there’s a Saul Goodman in my midst. Someone keeping a low profile, restarting their life under a pseudonym. Perhaps the one assisting the construction of new identities for those on the run uses this air pump crevice as their drop box for the steady roll out of documentation needed for their clients’ slow restart into a new life.

Who knows? I don’t know. That’s the point!

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I interact with a lot everyday. Stimulus and attention is the modern commodity. The interaction and stimulus are not unique to me, but here are my flavors.

Instagram, Facebook, NYT, Reddit. I cycle through these apps like a maniac, going through seasons of wiping them all from my phone to keep me from the endless scroll through (often, not always) senseless information presented as urgency. From that random guy I’ve exchanged maybe 4 words with Facebook post about the American political climate. To that girls IG story about radishes. The article about _____, only further highlighting the harshness of the day. The latest murmurings of hidden Pentagon programs related to UFO’s.

With the right wield of my thumbs, from slide to touch to tap, I can soar between these four worlds and endless others in under a minutes time. Glossing over each so quickly that rather than leaving an impression, they just sand away at the undulating terrain that once was personality, and create smooth an eroding topography that longs to be characterized by curiosity.

In the infinite info loop, nothing truly latches, and I’m stuck in a monotone placidity when I’ve just encountered more of the world in a minute than three generations prior encountered in a full year. And perhaps most consequentially, in the serial information overload, my curiosity has no idea what floor or partner to step out onto and dance with. So I’m left bitter, uninspired, and overwhelmed.

Which is why I’m grateful for those debit cards.

Because to understand time within a chronological context requires of me a symbolic rather than serial relationship to reality.

Said more simply…

My new daily challenge is to find one interesting thing and think about it for a while rather than looking over endless things and thinking about them passively. The endless scrolling, article reading, app hopping… it smoothes it all over to a point of zero retention.

In a sense, who cares about the debit cards? I mean, maybe the owner who doesn’t have their card any more… (still conflicted about that!) But ultimately to me, the debit cards themselves are inconsequential.

And yet the intersection I had with them is meaningful. It yielded curiosity and conscious thought.

How’s that work? The initially inconsequential being meaningful?

Because as a human, a descendent of someone who painted observation onto cave walls, my observation when paired with my curiosity can create meaning!

That matters. That’s cool.

The app hopping… I’m supposed to care about every single one of those things. At least that’s how it is presented to me in the context in which that information exists. But to care about all that is impossible, exhausting, and leads to this feeling of inadequacy that then melts itself into a surrender to a complacent flat, smooth, affect.

I find that oftentimes it’s the one thing that “doesn’t matter”, that I chose to be curious about, that tends to matter much more than a series of things I make myself aware of that “should” matter, to which I give no time of day.

What ends up mattering tends to be localized, has a context, and through its particularity, can seep into the universal in surprising ways

So here’s where this leaves me…

Become aware of something. Latch onto it. Don’t let it go.

It might come from the NYT or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram. That radish girl? Interesting! What’s going on there? But my relationship to that media is going to change significantly (for the better, I’d guess) if I can move my relationship to it away from the quantity to which I see, to the quality in which I become interested.

But perhaps the even better place to look for an observation is the anomaly that is noticed within the pattern.

The new thing noticed on the same walk, the way the tree in my front yard looks today versus last week, seeing what’s on the ground by the air pump.

Simone Weil said that attentiveness is a form of prayer. Mary Oliver put the same sentiment this way,

“I don’t know what a prayer is, but I do know how to pay attention.”

Truly paying attention is impossible with the “serial information” overload so much is couched within today. There will always be an endless overload of stimulus, article, news, and opinion.

Mindful attentiveness seems to rise for me in creating a symbolic relationship with a specific characteristic of reality. Letting a particular observation melt into the universal.

That’s the good stuff. That’s the fun. And, I’ve found, that’s where the transformation often is.