Snowing across Time

Another snow storm, but not a blizzard, has arrived. It seemed spectacular seen from the inside of this train as the train raced next to an Amtrak train through the snow, causing a white smoke of frost billowing in front of my window. Only a weekend ago was the region starting to recover from the blizzard that trapped me a few days before that at in parents' neighborhood. In some ways, that weekend, those three days in New York, seem so far away.

But in a different way, time has flown very quickly, and the snow made me think the blizzard had ended only yesterday. My life is becoming simpler even if I have only started scheming to make it simple. It is like being in Buenos Aires in that there aren't many different things I am doing. I get up at 6:40 in the morning, prepare breakfast and box my lunch, and if I have time, I have breakfast. Then I walk to the little train station to catch the same train everyday, where I write this journal entry and think. And as soon as I get to work, I sit at my desk, having greeted the people whose eyes I catch, and start working, or at least, doing stuff related to work. Then the day is quite homogenous. And then at 5:55 I leave, feeling a little guilty because most people have been staying beyond that, but I really this week have had not much to do. Then walk to the train station and take the same train every evening, where I would read a book. Then walk from the same little station where I was nearly 12 hours before and get home, and often without even resting, I would work the rest of the evening away, until I go to bed, with or without a shower.

That is my daily life with nothing left out. The bulk of the 24 hours is for work, which takes more time than sleep. There isn't room for cooking, baking, chatting with friends, spying on friends on Facebook, going shopping, or socializing in person. The simplicity is a little daunting, but at the same time, attractive. In the past eight years, eight and a half, almost, I have had too many complications. I felt especially in the past couple of years my brain had been running around, getting distracted. And often my heart, too, had been bouncing off at different angles from different parts of a chaotically designed room.

The simplicity of my daily work day leaves a lot of room for thinking and, as I am doing now, writing, as well as reading. As I have said earlier, simplicity means more room in this forest I have found myself somehow. I feel I am stumbling less, having more space for my emotions to manifest themselves internally to me, for my thoughts to be more tangible. This is especially true when I am taking the train in the morning, when the world, including the interior of the train (until we get to the first of the two stops), is very quiet. The tranquility isn't only heard, but also seen. Now with the snow the landscape seems even more sedated. Southern Connecticut isn't just a populated area of wealthy people living off the benefits of a complicated New York City; it also has many lakes and rivers that empty into the Sound. And in the winter, these bodies of water often are covered with snow as their surfaces are frozen, and around the water there is invariably some patch of leafless trees. We forget, especially living too long among glass buildings and inside automobiles, what peace nature, even if seen from inside a fast moving locomotive, can bring to the mind.

Yesterday I overheard a conversation between the colleague who is helping me understand the business and a colleague of his that he writes programs for. They were talking about people getting sick. One was saying how he had an operation not too long ago because of his cholesterol level, which is still going up. The other said he broke his back. And then a common colleague of theirs suffered a heart-attack during an operation of some sort. They are in their late forties, early fifties. And they seem broken, already. They were talking also about strategies to lose weight, for health's sake. The colleague of my colleague said, on a different thread of the conversation, that he had been working at the firm for more than 14 years.

Fourteen years. And one benefit, not necessarily out of the job, but at least from having been a human being in the past fourteen years, is becoming more and more broken, having to think about what to eat to keep alive longer. I think about my vegetarian friends, my granola friends, how they are younger than me and already know all sorts of tricks to stay healthy without needing to go to the gym. And between these friends and these two middle-age men, I stand, and I wonder where I have been and where I will go. I haven't been on the same life-conscious path as these friends of mine, and I hope I won't be on that sad path, I think sad, that these two men have found themselves. What does it take to have the life you want? I guess, you need to know what you want first.

Hopefully, with my life less and less cluttered, I know more what I really want, more or less, and that I can keep up with the changes of these wants.