Things to Be Grateful For #12

My daily commute reaches places in my heart that I forgot existed. It makes me think of what has gone and what’s yet to come.

I am grateful for the length of it, for the two hours it takes to travel from the city to the office, for the way the landscape slowly surrenders its urban density and opens into something older, greener, more forgiving. The train (and then a bus) carries me past the edges of Paris, past the banlieues with their repeating geometries, until suddenly the world outside the window becomes fields. Vast green plains stretching toward horizons. And in this slowness, this enforced pause between the person I am at home and the person I must become at work, something wonderful happens.

Rousseau has talked about the rhythm of movement unlocking chambers of the mind that stillness keeps sealed. I believe my commute operates on the same principle. I avoid scrolling through the anxious feeds that fragment our attention into ever smaller shards. I try to sit, and watch the green unfurl, and let my thoughts wander where they will. In the mornings, when the train pulls away from the station and the buildings begin to thin, I feel something loosen in my chest. The day ahead sits heavy with its meetings, its coordination across time zones, its conversations conducted in three languages. But for now, for this hour, none of it exists. There is only the window, and the light (always different, always the same), and the green fields that do not care about my daily tribulations. I have begun to notice things I would never notice if I drove, or if the journey were shorter. The way certain trees catch the early light. The farmhouses that appear and disappear like memories surfacing and submerging. A particular bend in the landscape where the fields open suddenly and the sky seems to double in size. These have become landmarks of a different kind.

The evening journey operates slightly differently but serves the same purpose. By the time I board the bus home, my mind is cluttered with the residue of the day. The green fields receive it all. I watch them scroll past in the fading light and feel the day slowly lift from my shoulders.. The commute has given me new eyes for the same landscape, traveled twice daily, yet never quite the same. Now there’s a winter passage, when darkness frames the journey and the occasional lit farmhouse becomes a meditation on other lives being lived, other evenings unfolding. I know this landscape now. I know the season by its colors, the weather by its textures, the time by the quality of light falling on certain slopes. This knowledge feels precious in a way I did not anticipate.

Perhaps what I am most grateful for is that the commute creates a genuine boundary, a space that belongs neither to work nor to home but exists between them, a kind of decompression chamber for the self. In the morning, I enter it as someone still attached to the intimacies of private life, to the particular silence of the apartment after my departure. I emerge ready, or readier, for the public self that work requires. In the evening, the process reverses. I board as someone still entangled in professional concerns and I arrive home having metabolized enough of it to be present again, to be available for the smaller, quieter registers of personal life.

There is a line from Stefan Zweig I return to often, about how certain experiences reach places in us we had forgotten existed. He was writing about music, about art, about those encounters that bypass the rational mind and speak directly to something deeper. But the commute, I have discovered, can do this too. Not every day. Not as a guaranteed transaction. But often enough that I have learned to protect this time, to refuse to optimize it, to resist the temptation to make it productive in any measurable way. The green fields ask nothing of me. They do not need me to be clever or competent or even particularly awake. They only need me to look, and in looking, to remember that I am more than the sum of my tasks. That there are places in the heart that open only when given space and silence and the slow scroll of landscape through glass. That what has gone and what is yet to come can coexist in the same gaze, held together by the patience of the journey.