Train-sience
Transience (noun)
the state or fact of lasting only for a short time; transitoriness.
"the transience of life and happiness"
What this post is not about: the joy and contentment that comes from savoring the present moment.
What it is about: the pleasure of motion — physically and psychologically. Temporality. Sandwiches, turkey & cheese. Coconut Trees.
When I was four years old, my parents and I lived across the street from a commercial railway line.
Beside the track, was (and still is) an old deli with a pink roof. I really enjoyed the sound of the train as a child, so it became a wholesome tradition for my dad and I to buy sliced turkey and Swiss cheese from the deli and eat it, without bread, in the car as we waited for the train to pass.
When it did, I would yell “Train! Train!” like it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. In the moment, it probably was.
And why? If only I could climb into the mind of my four-year-old self and tell you. I’d like to believe it had something to do with (a lack of) object permanence. When the train appeared, it was as if I was seeing it whoosh by for the first time. And when it disappeared, I was sad, because it no longer existed. Rinse and repeat.
I don’t know how this train-spotting tradition began. Nor do I remember these moments firsthand.
I only know that the whole thing made me very happy, as it does to recall decades later.
—
This deep-seated love for the train — steadily on the rise as a result of my adult foray into rail travel — is what recently moved me to take a four hour train from Belgrade to Užice, followed by another hour and a half bus to Mokra Gora, a village in Western Serbia near the Bosnian border, simply in order to ride another train… in a loop for three hours.
The Šargan Eight is a historical, narrow-gauge rail route that once connected Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, but now serves as a solely scenic tourist attraction, offering picturesque vistas and a strong dose of nostalgia.
After a week in the city, the views were lovely and the fresh mountain air was welcome. But what drew me to this train in particular was the idea of being on one, going nowhere.
I love trains not for where they take me, nor for their carbon-offset (while nice)… but for the way I feel while on one.
Which I will now attempt to describe.
—
On the train, the nature of time and of my self is skewed. Temporality shifts.
I don’t exist.
Or, the reverse: I exist in a hundred different pieces of time and space at once.
It’s almost as if I am still that four-year-old girl watching a train pass by and then vanish into thin air. But at the same time, I am me, now, flying on the tracks.
I am both inside a parked car on the side of the road, and on the train itself. While in motion, my perceived sense of self defies object permanence.
And this feels really, really right.
I am not fixed. I have always taken issue with defining myself and the nature of my life. In high school, the idea of picking three adjectives to describe myself in college applications essays, tedious. In university, the task of writing out a five year plan for my future, torturous.
Too many options! Too many possibilities! I have always felt open to new sides of myself.
This feeling of movement, of expansion, of growth (and sometimes regression) is, for me, vital. In fact, I will go so far as to say it should be so for everyone.
(This does not imply we cannot have stability or consistency. The two must coexist.)
And because things will always shift, change and move, upwards, forwards, backwards — onwards — grasping the awareness of a transient moment is like a getting a glimpse of a shooting star.
Trains are this feeling embodied. One transient moment after the other.
Train-sience.
—
“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Here’s the thing, Kamala. The thing about existing in context.
It gets exhausting.
We are always thinking in context. It is impossible not to. Either about that one crucial moment which brought us to where we are now, or that time we royally fucked up all those years ago, or how we might do better in the future, even in this very moment.
Our thoughts, our consciousness… this is the context of our lives. Inescapable.
Then, there’s the outside gaze. We’re always being perceived, perhaps wrongly, by others based on some context. Whether said perception is true or not is beside the point.
(Side note. One of the things I love most about meeting new people on the road: as an individual, I lack context. No one knows a thing about me or my life. My stories and my situations. Enjoying this is not about some desire for a clean slate of self, but rather about receiving a new perspective on my self. Strangers have the ability to offer this near instantaneously.)
Existing outside of a known context is an invitation to lean into being with the usual reference points.
And somehow, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, being physically in motion pulls me out of any perceivable context.
On the train, I exist only in the exact moment in one place for one second — and that’s it.
Or, not at all. When the Šargan Eight passes through a tunnel, the world turns pitch black. Cold wind in my face, I may very well not exist at all.
That’s one hell of a definition of freedom.
In those moments, I have indeed just fallen out of a coconut tree.
And then the train grinds to a halt. My feet touch the Earth. And I am me again.
ONWARDS,
Mag