Hotel lifts: a holiday of the heart

We're returning to the hotel. We approach from hurried street level. It's like the early 1900s, and the sense of excitement at a trolley bus is magnified. Carnival-like. We cross the road, stepping over the tracks, lightness and excitement.

It's a welcoming cavernousness to arrive.

There's a crescent pool down at the entrance, we are now seeing it out an internal window a floor up. It's a concrete edged, fake blue pool. Like the 50s has come suddenly without notice. A sense of repetition. A feeling of another hotel, another hotel pool. A monorail track circles the hotel over another pool.

We go to the elevators. They're gold. We enter. Press floor 7. The lift goes up, stops, collects people, and continues sideways through the hotel, over a street, into and through a high-level department store. It's a weird feeling, it's unhinged from normal lift behaviour, but what can we do? Partly helpless, partly fascinated, we see the sights sail past sideways as we course through the air.

The lift stops, before opening the door. It opens to a sky terrace.

It's not right though, we enter and try again. Press another button. More twists and turns than Gringott's bank.

Now it's more sedate and we can see women's silk dresses through the glass now, as we gently sail by. As if we might be in the 1920s again.

The doors open back in the hotel, oblivious to our preferred destination, back at the lobby.

It's not like we lack excitement. There's so much in life we filter to get to daily tasks. But what to prioritise? Work, usually, or something compelling, something direct. A linear process, a series of actions, competing with the background noise.

There's so much happening we have had to practically close the senses!

Imagine! A tram causing a party. Can you believe that zeppelins were really real? We have a car that parks itself and communicate instantly with each other and don't even notice it.

The novelty of the future is no less amazing than the novelty of the past, and if we notice it, the present is just as surprising. It's a myriad of directions, times, and places, and when have we ended up being in ten times and places at once? Daily?

At the delta, the place of collecting all the silts and sands of the journey, the river starts meandering, fanning out, meets the sea somewhere entirely new. What used to be a strong straight current goes elsewhere, everywhere. A direct experience travels the byways til it reaches us, or passes us, or we catch up with it later.

The lift shaft channels aren't clear and direct, our attention isn't attuned to now, the flow is meandering. An overly mental focus keeps pulling us up and away from our destination. The room of our heart, a holiday hotel room.

Do we know where we are aiming for? Does the magnetic pull exist in this space? Is it just another labyrinth?

Can we receive a moment and directly be with it?

Yet the golden elevator, the royal path, the yellow brick road is accessible and even has buttons!