Bittersweet Moment on the Train

This morning I experienced one of those bittersweet moments that one gets sometimes. As I have said before, I’ve spent time working in a city, and the commute is kinda long. There are a couple of ways I can get to the city … I can drive all the way (expensive and potentially time-consuming), I can take the train all the way (definitely time-consuming), or I can drive part-way and take the train part-way (for the most part, the best option). However sometimes I need to use the time on the train for working, so I do that for a week. This week I’m on the train.

I got on at Wyong, further back in the train than I normally sit. The train left the station, and I started working, and was unsuccessful because I hadn’t installed some software that I needed to do what was required. At some point, a girl who looked to be in her early twenties got on the train. Now this in itself is not remarkable. Yes, she was a pretty girl, but that’s not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was the fact that she was smiling. It was just after 6 in the morning, there had been ice on the windscreen of my car, I was sitting on an uncomfortable seat with a computer that didn’t have the right software, and she was smiling. She was sitting at the other end of the carriage in the area where the seats face sideways, so she was unlikely to have noticed me amongst the other 50-odd passengers facing in her direction. Good thing, too. It would have been a shame to have wiped that profiled smile off her face.

But I wondered … why the mirth? What is so entertaining? Then I saw that she had a camera out. She was taking pictures out the window, and by the looks of it, she was taking video, too. Ah. That explained it. She’d not taken this trip before. You see, the journey from Woy Woy to Hornsby has to be one of the most beautiful train trips in the world. There are tunnels, bridges across pristine waterways, and slow winding trails around the Hawkesbury River with what seems like mountains rising either side of the river. The tracks runs clear along the highest ridge of (again I’ll use the word) a mountain, and you can see a carpet of foliage clear out to the sun rising over the ocean. Beautiful. And I get to see it every day. This is the sweet part of it.

So where is the bitter? Well, I would get to see it every day, if I bothered to look out the window. I’ve ridden this train so many times that I won’t even make the effort to turn my head the thirty degrees required to feast upon the splendour. I’ve become so inured to the beauty that now it just escapes my attention. I don’t actively dislike it, it just doesn’t interest me.

So the bittersweet moment hit me when I realised that if this girl, whose face was transformed from normalcy into radiance as a reflection of the beauty she was surveying, continued to ride this train, she would quickly lose her awe. Her camera would stay in her bag. She would read a book or a newspaper. She would attempt to create in her mind an encapsulated reality that would block her view of glory. Why? For no other purpose than an attempt to escape being bored.