let the train take the strain

I learned to drive about 10 years ago. It’s fine. I can get places and sometimes, when you get the right combination of light in the sky, bends in the road and music from the speakers, it’s a nice experience.

Driving is nothing compared to the train though. Since I became a car owner, I travel less on public transport and live more in my own bubble. I think that has fundamentally altered my psychology and on balance, I don’t think it’s been a good thing.

In a car, you can’t wonder at things. On a train, you can soak up the people around you. The beautiful, the mundane, the stange. You can drift in and out of snatches of conversation. You can tune out altogether and stare out of the window and let the rise and fall of changing images calm the ever turgid mind.

Occasionally I have moments of clarity. Overwhelming sensory experiences that feel like epiphanies about place and time. They stand out in the memory, not for their importance but in many ways the opposite. I remember random images far more completely than I do events of life altering significance.

The train glides smoothly through landscape, industry, it shows you the back of things, the underneath, the rear fences and yards. The places untended

In winter, it lets you soak in the frozen fields, their rich soil trapped beneath a touch surface. Tundra is a word of beauty, evoking far off exotic bleakness but in this icy moment, the familiar world is transformed to elsewhere.

In summer, the verdant fecundity is never more apparent than in the land trapped between metal rail and metal fence. The overgrowth is such a literal word but it perfectly encapsulates the sense of tangled and entwined life which seems to much, too rich, too vibrant to be real. Little birds burst from thickets. An entire world lurks, undisturbed and in a death grip balance with itself. This narrow strip is a tiny lesson in how things would be if we were no more. The world left to live by its own rules. Beauty and horror.

When I visit another city on my own, I often walk around with no distinct aim. To follow the map laid out seems to be defeated in someway. The pleasure of turning left and right upon a whim. Of walking counter to the flow and away from the crowd is a deep pleasure and one I don’t really understand intellectually but feels natural to me on the level of my soul, such as that may be.

A supreme pleasure, within this already ecstatic experience is to stumble upon a train station that is unfamiliar. Once, in London, I happened unexpectedly upon Marylebone. To enter this brick, glass and ornate metalwork was a moment of wonder I can only liken to the sense of cool and calm that hits even the most skeptical when setting foot in a great cathedral or temple. The same slight sense of trespass that is then erased as you are absorbed by something of scale.

I’d walked for miles already, trading 4 story Victoriana for streets crammed with Turkish and African business, then swapping to parks with sweeping curves and runners locked into their own rhythm. I’d been bustled across great roads as people built up and then flowed, the traffic signal like dam in the river of people that then broke as the colours changed. I’d been daunted by concrete underpasses, awed by planes flying low, seeming to thread their way through the weave of buildings on the skyline as they came to land.

Now I stopped and caught my breath. As the destination board played out it’s information, I soaked in all the names of all the places I’d never been. I pictured myself leaving here to somewhere else unknown. I let myself think of chocolate villages and shipping container industrial plains alike. Of Friday night English town pent up aggression and of the soft wind blowing through woodland and stroking the carpet of bluebells that lay on its floor.

At moments like this, I have no self. I have no needs or desires. I have no god, I have no feelings. There is nothing but everything and everything runs through me. I am nothing and yet, I am part of a universe that stretches to infinity.

This is not a feeling I have ever felt at a motorway service station or when waiting at the traffic lights.