The heat wasn't working in this car. But I didn't realize it until a woman asked the conductor as she walked down the aisle if the next car was warmer. The outside was, obviously, much colder. As we were approaching Bridgeport, I could see immense white clouds spewing out of the ominous chimneys of that old industrial port town. While train had stopped at the station I looked up the biggest chimney, white and red, almost like the barber sign, and saw how the hot air didn't become white until a good distance away from the exit of the chimney. The sky had a cold blue to it; very light, almost white, with some clouds smeared randomly across it. The sun had risen by the time I got to the main station, and now it was slowly rising, almost reluctantly, like I was this morning, this second morning of the second week.
In about fifteen minutes I will be getting off the train and repeating the schedule of yesterday and the days of last week. Before the train pulls in the station, I often see a few people waiting by the highway exit between the highway and the train tracks. I don't know who they are, but they remind me of the workers waiting for work in India, or what I have seen on TV of Mexican migrants waiting for offers of temp work. I wonder if these people are doing the same.
I had a dream about my Dad last night. I can't remember what it was about, not even a hint of it, just that it was about him. And I remembered again having this dream today in the train, at the thought of seeing those men who might be waiting for some temp work this early in the morning. I thought about where I was now. My grand scheme of simplifying my life. There's a part of me that thinks it's a luxury to be able to simplify one's life. Life isn't actually that simple, at least not for most people, like my Dad, at least when he was growing up, or for those who have to wait for someone to possibly show up with a possible job that he might possibly get. (And I can imagine how there are even fewer choices in life for many women.) On my fast walk to the main station today a man in his late fifties was also, seemingly, going to work. I wondered why he had to go to work. If I were his age, wouldn't I be traveling? Maybe he didn't have money. Maybe he didn't have energy or will like my Dad. Maybe he had other reasons.
There are those of us who can't afford a simple life, who have to work, take care of a lot of trouble that come to them, and struggle with the unknown future with a sense of deep helplessness. My Dad was one of them. While he no longer has a complicated life, in fact, one of the simplest I know of people, he is too used to the complications of life, and feels at least helpless in not having a complicated life, if that makes any sense. Then there are people like me, like the two men that chat about their lives next to me at work, and possibly most people in that bank. We have no fear of complications from nature or politics. We are riding on a boat with the powerful, and we have this deluded sense that as long as we are with them, we can leave the basic worries of nature and politics to the majority of people around us.
But the irony, the cruel irony, for us and for them, too, is that it is in our nature, a legacy of human's fear of nature and of their own societies, that we will find ways to complicate our lives even if neither nature nor politics pose any more problems. The stories I have related about those two men are good examples. We who have money really need not have all these complications, but we do, as if we need to. And so it is a luxury for me to think about and implement the process of simplifying my life. And I take that luxury as a way to honor those who have had to endure complications they couldn't control so that those minority of us could have the option of continuing a life of complications or the option of enjoying this new freedom humans have rarely seen in their history.
And perhaps, from this simplicity, I can see a little more clearly what needs to be done next. There are those who make their lives complicated in order to make the lives of others, especially those who have no choice, a little better, a little simpler.
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