The Commute

When waiting for a train nothing more is required than presence. This is a stretch of time without additional expectations. Do something or do nothing. Compose thoughts, or don’t. Be attentive, be distracted, the train will arrive regardless.

And just as it is for me when I’m in a real traffic jam — that is, in a physical traffic jam — in my mental traffic jam I will always be thinking, absurdly, that if only I could push on forwards, even just a little — just the fraction of a roll — I will soon be able to prompt the car in front of me to roll forwards too, and then the car in front of that, and on and so forth, until the whole long cavalcade of cars (thoughts) can then push on past the knot, and be free.

When I am on the road, risking it all with a rusted-off chain and creaky saddle, I want to be seen, my existence hailed into being only in relation to the cars beside me. I want to be acknowledged by these hulking machines – which, I’m sure, could crush me like a bug without a moment’s hesitation were it not for their simpering drivers inside – as something formidable, something unknowable but fearsome all the same. I present myself like a challenge. Go on then, run me over.

And so when he began to travel for his studies, the boy found his mobility offered him a vantage point from which to relate to people and place. The boy would commute every weekday of his teenage years to and from his suburban home in the southwest and his selective school in inner city Sydney.

Loving someone, however, isn’t so easy. Loving someone for your entire life, even your child, especially your child, can be one of the most difficult things you will ever do.

I was 26, and I didn’t know it yet, but I was set to become an urban geographer. Cycling had nurtured my interest in people and place, in cities and landscape, in society and culture.

By some cosmic sophomoric prank, despite my desire to become what some people call a writer, my true occupation on this earth has always been and always will be captured by the construction ‘a car-man is a car-man is a car-man is a car-man’, and if that formulation makes your skin crawl, try telling me about it, since the only escape from this fate of mine is the one Henry Lawson recommended above, and that salvation is forbidden by religion.