The Girl in the Park: A Kafkaesque Encounter#

It was one of those days when the sky seemed undecided—clouds drifting lazily, neither promising rain nor revealing the sun. In the middle of a quiet park stood a girl on a wooden bridge, gazing at the stream below. Her posture was serene, but her face carried an expression of deep contemplation, as if she were deciphering a secret that the world had forgotten.

I sat on a bench nearby, curious. She wasn’t looking at her phone or reading a book, as most people in the park would. She simply observed the water as it flowed, unhurried, yet relentless. Time seemed irrelevant in her world.

Eventually, I couldn’t resist. I approached her.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked hesitantly.

Without looking up, she replied, “I’m thinking about whether the stream is moving or if it’s the world around it that’s shifting.”

Her words unsettled me. It was such a simple observation, yet it felt like a challenge to everything I understood about reality. I found myself questioning: when we walk through life, are we the ones in motion, or is life simply flowing past us while we remain still?

A Kafkaesque Spiral#

Her question reminded me of Kafka’s characters—trapped in worlds where logic folds in on itself, where every answer only leads to more questions. As we talked, I realized she wasn’t merely observing the stream. She was dissecting the nature of existence itself.

“What if we’re like the water?” she mused. “We think we have control over our flow, our direction. But aren’t we just following a path carved out by something larger, something we can’t see?”

“Like fate?” I ventured.

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe we’re just a collection of moments, moving forward but never truly arriving.”

I wanted to respond, but her words weighed too heavily. She continued:

“Think about it. Every day, we wake up with plans, ambitions, and routines. But in the end, we’re at the mercy of forces beyond us. The stream doesn’t decide to twist around rocks or flow faster after rain—it just does. Maybe we’re no different.”

Philosophy in the Mundane#

As I left the park that day, her words lingered. I couldn’t help but see everything differently. The people jogging on the path—were they moving forward in life, or were they being swept along by time? The pigeons pecking at crumbs—did they even understand hunger, or were they simply acting out of instinct?

In Kafka’s stories, the characters often grapple with systems they cannot comprehend, like Josef K. in The Trial or Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. Their struggles mirror our own: the desire for meaning in an indifferent universe. The girl in the park had shown me a slice of that same truth, hidden in the ordinary flow of a stream.

A Real-Life Reflection#

Her question isn’t one we can answer, and perhaps that’s the point. Life often feels like that Kafkaesque spiral—a series of questions with no definitive answers, where the journey itself is what matters.

Maybe the stream doesn’t need to know where it’s going. Maybe we don’t either. The beauty lies not in the arrival, but in the flow—the twists, the turns, and the ever-changing scenery along the way.

As I sat at my desk later that night, I thought about returning to the park. I wanted to talk to her again, to ask if she ever found her answer. But then I realized: maybe she was never looking for one. Maybe she was just enjoying the question.

And maybe, so should we.