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Archives
The Conversations You Have With Yourself On The Train
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Posted by Dez Fontaine Filed in Personal #urban culture #city life #self-discovery #introspection #public transportation 12 views
I been riding the same line for three years now and I just realized something mad - the city trains are like the only place left where you can be completely alone while surrounded by hundreds of people. And I mean truly alone with your thoughts, no phone signal cutting in and out, no notifications, just you and whatever's rattling around in your head while the train shakes underneath you.
Last week I was heading downtown around 6pm and this older dude sat next to me, must have been in his seventies, and he just stared out the window the whole ride. Didn't look at his phone once. Didn't read anything. Just watching the tunnels pass and the stations light up. And I got it then. He wasn't waiting for his stop. He was having a conversation with himself that required a moving train and dim fluorescent lights to happen right.
The thing about city living that nobody talks about is how much of your actual thinking happens in transit. Like the real decisions, the ones that matter, they don't happen at your desk or your apartment. They happen when you're underground moving forty miles an hour with your reflection staring back at you in the window. That's where you work through the stuff. That's where you figure out who you actually are versus who you're pretending to be.
I've watched people get on at one stop completely bent out of shape and get off five stops later with their whole face changed. Not because anything external happened. Just because they had twenty minutes of forced silence and movement to reckon with themselves. The train does that. The city does that if you let it.
Most people take the train and they're escaping into their phones or headphones. They're running from that conversation. But the ones who get it, the ones who actually live here and not just exist here, they know that commute is where the real city talks to you. That's when you get honest.
What conversations are you avoiding on your commute right now?