This morning I took the bus to work. Normally, I am a strict subway girl and I only revert to the bus when the subway breaks down and I don't mind being late to work. Today I had a spare twenty minutes and couldn't really justify not taking the bus to myself. Bizarrely, the bus is a kind of a luxury to me. It offers me space, new sites and fantastic people-watching, but, most importantly and most splendidly, it offers me time. The subway is merely a way to get from A to B as quickly as possible and with as little human interaction as possible. But the bus. The bus is a time machine. The bus is affected by weather and other people and madcap taxi drivers and traffic and stop lights with the result that the bus is going to take as long as it's going to take no matter your hurry or your deadline.
To some this may seem a trifle inconvenient or even frustrating. But not to me. To me, the bus gives me the gift of this time spent in traffic that the subway so neatly avoids. On the bus you simply can't do anything other than await your stop. And this gives me the ultimate luxury: time to simply sit and think.
I always get on the bus with the absolute best of thinking intentions. I'm going to finally plan out the plot to that novel I've always wanted to write or I'm going to make a mental to-do list of things I need to buy and errands I need to run. But I never do. I've been (magically!) given an hour to just think, it hardly seems appropriate to waste it on mundane topics I could think about anywhere and anytime. So my mind inevitably wanders over topics that I wouldn't get to think about otherwise: my future life-plans (real and fantasy), my personal life, places I’d like to live, people I know, interactions I’ve had, animals I’ve seen. This doesn't make any of these topics unimportant. No, oftentimes what I think about on the bus is the most important thinking I'll do all day. It's a beautiful thing, watching the city blur by as it shifts from the residential pre-wars of the Upper East Side to the midtown glassy high-rises and back down to the low-scale of the East Village, all the while thinking about your life and the things that actually matter, not the insignificant things like errands that you must do in a day.
So I’m grateful for the bus this morning and the time it bestowed upon me and the thoughts I therefore had time to think.
2 comments:
That sounds absolutely fantastic. Maybe I should start taking the bus too!
It is wonderful! Most of the time, I really appreciate the time I get on the subway to read (an hour a day I wouldn't otherwise have to do so!), but thinking on the bus is sometimes really wonderful. I guess public transportation does wonders that way. It bestows time right and left!
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