About The Train Of Life

Continuing along the same track as my previous post (see what I did there? 😃) there are many pieces of writing that use the metaphor of a train journey to depict our own life journey.  Like all metaphors (just most metaphors?) it does break down eventually, but it does help illustrate what I was getting at with the idea of ephemeral friendships.

The standard way of visualising this is that your passage through life beginning at birth is like a train journey with people getting on and off at stations along the way and ending when you yourself leave the train on your own death. Here is one version of the story :

This simplistic view works well to introduce the ideas and, for many people, it may be sufficient to clarify their own worldview.  However, everyone’s life journey is different and for some this may be just too simplistic.

Assuming that we stick with a single train journey representing our journey through life then there are a few additions that I would make to better fit with my own life journey.

The first is to make explicit the fact that the train has many carriages – each of which is representative of a ‘community’ that I belong in at some part of my life.  Unlike a real train, the configuration of these carriages is continually changing during the journey (actually this does work a lot more like this on the continent – travelling around Europe it is not uncommon to get groups of carriages that join and get separated) and some are easier to reach than others)

The metaphor is already being stretched because the question that immediately comes to mind is that I am on this train – other people are on their own trains – or are they – is there just one train shared by everyone – or does everyone have their own train superimposed on top of others? 🤔 Lets assume for the moment that we are only interested in how our own train works!

Note – in a similar way the “Red Thread” falls down when you start to try to visualise ALL the red threads rather than just the one connecting you to another person.

In this post I am going to continue the thought experiment with a few examples of people who travel with us along the way.  These are all based on real friends (although in some cases I reserve the right to combine multiple people in order to make a more coherent story) and the way that we have interacted.

I guess we start off with the fact that when we ourselves get on to ‘our’ train for the journey we are actually joining an existing ‘community’ – our family.  Perhaps this is the only moment on the journey when there is a welcome party who are expecting our arrival – at least in the way that they have been anticipating it for quite a long time – without knowing precisely when it would happen.  This carriage of the train is the one where we will spend almost all of our early years.

Everyone who boards the train has a role to play – otherwise there would be no point in them getting on.  For some, indeed for most, that role may well be simply that of a spectator or observer.  For many the role will be undefined or unknown when they board and, indeed, a single fellow passenger may well perform multiple roles during the journey.  I would posit that only a relative few have a definite role to start with – clearly mother and father would qualify in that category and when each of your schoolteachers comes aboard it is with a specific purpose in mind.  That is not to say that these well defined roles cannot be added to – so a teacher can become a good friend (or enemy 😮).

Where the role is initially unknown it rather depends on your attitude to predetermination as to whether you think that the roles that they eventually play are somehow already known (at least to someone) or whether the choices made along the journey will shape the way in which roles are allocated.

Looking back, I cannot think of many people who have come into my life with their role already fully defined.  Schoolteachers are one exception and there are a few others, but for the most part people have assumed roles at some stage after they have been on the journey for a while.

Some arrive onboard with a fanfare – others almost sneak on without being noticed.  I can think of people who I have “known” for a while without particularly interacting with them who have – for one reason or another – become very important to me, assuming roles that are very central to my journey in some way or other.  I think, for instance, of someone who was among the “not really noticed” group for some years, joining me on many parts of my journey without playing a central part.  Then one day we ‘connected’ – pretty unexpectedly (certainly on my part) – and that particular red thread was pulled tight and strong for a while.

Another person who illustrates the multi-role nature of this came onboard quite obviously – we were both in the same musical group – and they were, to some extent someone who was learning from me in an informal way – we were friends and they developed some skills “under my wing” – so to speak.  Later, in a slightly weird twist of fate we became teacher and pupil in a formal way – but in the long term the roles were changed – they became the expert and someone that I could ‘admire’.

As I said above, when you board this particular train the destination is, inevitably, your final stop – when you leave the train on the occasion of your death.  (there is plenty of philosophical/theological discussion to be had about that statement, but I am not going there at the moment)  However, along the way you have some intermediate destinations which are defined by your goals/ambitions/desires etc..  This again leads to stretching the metaphor a bit as these intermediate stops will be reached by different – maybe conflicting – routes which often run in parallel.  We could follow a sort of quantum powered track where you are on multiple trains at once 😂 but I feel it is more understandable – if less accurate – to assume that your train is applying some complicated algorithm solving the Travelling Salesman Problem to determine what is the best route that satisfies all of the goals.

The goals themselves will be almost fractal in nature – each will have a set of sub-goals – and each them sub-sub-goals and so on ad infinitum.  One such path is learning with the goal of being “well-educated” (whatever that actually means); another is career progression with the goal of a “good job” (again whatever that means); immediately it is clear that whilst those are two separate goals they intertwine a lot; a further goal could be to create your own family – or if you like – to extend your existing one; there will almost certainly be some hobbies that you want to become proficient at.

That slight diversion 😃 took us away from the central ‘friends’ topic but it was necessary since the achievement of those intermediate destinations will (probably) be done with the help of others – and those others will, for the most part, be only necessary for that goal.  Very few will reach the elevated status that affords a front row seat to your life.

As I write bits of this – then have a break – and come back to it later – it is becoming clear to me that rather than “the finished product” this post is going to be a bit of a stepping off point – introducing some ways of thinking about the subject and outlining ideas about things that are important to think about as you delve deeper into the metaphor.

The next item on that list is considering how these other people come to travel on “your” train.  Clearly some are – if you like – inevitable fellow travellers – our parents, our siblings, other relatives. Some are at the complete other end of the spectrum and have joined the train almost by accident – these would include the large number of people who observe parts of your life without ever (seemingly) impacting it.  (I inserted seemingly, because even these people can have effects that they are not aware of).  Some people will be sort of invited onboard – I am thinking here of those that you actually want to become closer to – perhaps a romantic link, perhaps an interest in knowing more about their ideas, perhaps someone you know can advance you on the journey to one or more of your goals.  Of course, there will be those who come onboard for precisely the opposite – i.e. they believe that you can advance their journey towards a goal so they actively move to join your train.  All of this works in both directions.

In this category I would include what these days might be termed ‘virtual’ people – by that I mean people that you would like to have in your life, but who – for one reason or another – would never actually be there.  The author of a favourite book, the composer/performer of a favourite piece of music, even characters in a book.  It may seem strange to think of inviting Beethoven on to your train – but for some people his music is definitely part of the journey.  (unlike some, it is safe to assume that these people will not be reciprocating by inviting you onto their train😉 although it is interesting to think about how the fans of a performer appear on the performer’s train – I guess as simply observers)

So, some of your fellow passengers are there by choice – either yours or theirs.  Choices also will determine how far they travel with you.  This is something that I have addressed in part before – the fact that every little decision we make can have significant downstream impacts – and that is not just for yourself, but also for all the fellow travelers.  It may not affect all of them equally and, yes, for some it will have such a small impact that it will go unnoticed.  In terms of your own train journey each decision will have no impact on the final destination – your final demise – however it clearly could change how long it takes to get there 🤔.

There are big decisions and small ones – in terms of how the passenger community is affected.  If you change your job, or move to a new area or similar this will certainly make a big difference to who you are travelling with – especially, of course, those who are on, so to speak, the fringes of your community.  There are other types of decision though which can have significant impacts on those who are much closer to you on the journey.

I think of someone who was a close friend, sharing many adventures together for a long time.  They met the love of their life and their connections changed drastically.  Exacerbated by a move away to a new area the links they had formed over many years became less strong.  I will say that the link with me remained – in some way – strong even though our travel on each other’s train became less frequent.  That was a decision/choice made by someone else that impacted my journey.

When I moved to work in Vienna it was a choice made by me that impacted others.  I gained a group of new fellow travellers whilst losing others – in some case temporarily, in others for the rest of the journey (at least so far).

In the “good old days” your fellow travellers would be there with you – physically – at least in most cases. Pen friends were, I guess, one of the exceptions to that – don’t suppose anyone uses that particular phrase much now. Things have – without doubt – changed and now I suspect that for most people the majority of their fellow travellers are virtual rather than physical – existing in the “metaverse” rather than in the “here and now”. This thought on its own opens up a number of interesting new rabbit holes to go down 😂 however, for now I will confine myself to considering the basic meaning of having such virtual travellers along for the ride.

The biggest difference is that it becomes much more difficult to determine who is “there” and who is “somewhere else”. Have they left the train or are they simply manifesting themselves in a different part of the train. Having lived through the change from the physical to the virtual in this regard there is a further question of determining how much some people existed “on the train” when there was no way for them to exist ‘virtually’. I think her of quite a few people who seemingly left my train for one reason or another and who – it seems – have since rejoined the train as I have connected with them again online.

I think of one example – someone who for a few years was a very good friend – then circumstances had us in different parts of the country and we lost touch – recently we have reconnected even though now we are in completely different ends of the earth. To what extent were they always “still on the train” and I just couldn’t discern their presence? That is also true of quite a few people who I made an effort to contact once social media came into our lives. To some extent they must have been somewhere “on the train” because I wanted to bring them back closer to me.

Was I on their train? I guess yes, again, although it may well be that the pulling closer again was one sided and it hadn’t occurred to them to do so. I have (I think) described elsewhere how most if not all connections are unequal – seemingly more important to one of the pair than to the other.

There is, I suspect, much more to come in this vein, however this single post has been hanging around a few days now and is a bit long – so I will publish it.

I will just finish with a little bit of an epilogue thought – perhaps foreshadowing some future thoughts…..

Given the fact that I am now in my seventies I am most certainly more aware that I am, so to speak, getting closer to the buffers 😂 – not in any morbid way, simply that increasingly I think “is this the last time that I will….” and that has to be a consideration. Yes, this could, potentially, be my last post! All of this is not because I am feeling like there is any imminent danger of me fulfilling any “last times” – just that it is part of my thinking in a way that it wasn’t not so long ago.

Hopefully I will be riding this train for a while yet – and who knows who I might meet along what is left of the journey.