The moment I step onto the platform, I take the deepest breath I’ve taken all morning. My more-than-an-hour-long commute involves a fifteen-minute walk to the subway station. Still ahead of me: one eastbound train, one southbound, a streetcar, and a seven-minute trudge through rain or snow. Once I step on board the subway, I’m ready to settle in.
At parties and dinners, I complain to anyone who will listen about this injustice (“more than an hour!”). But on these mornings, as I choose the perfect seat (window, facing forward), flatten my bag in my lap, and slip my headphones on, I am almost giddy: a whole hour with nothing to do.
Perhaps it’s the eldest-daughter-working-mother of it all, but here, there are no dishes to put away, no tiny toddler socks to match, and no family calendar to organize. I am a person who is bad at saying no. “No worries,” I say when anyone asks me to do anything, even though, as many memes have joked, there are worries aplenty. But the limitations of an underground train make it so that the urge to feel productive becomes futile: Try to send an email (“hope you’re well!”), but cell service is too patchy. Try to read the news (“oh no”), and I’m faced with a blank page that won’t load.
There is a quality of stillness to being on a moving train, bus, or streetcar. Most passengers are quiet; people aren’t looking at each other, except for a second or two. It is a way to be around others but not with them—an experience I craved in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in the early months of parental leave.
When I was younger (and kept a young person’s hours), I would snooze through my forty-minute bus ride from downtown Mississauga to an office building on the outskirts of the city. When I was a bit older and working one of my first journalism jobs, I would sometimes indulge in a few tears after the stresses of the day. Crying on a public train is somehow so lonely and so sad that it is also healing.
Today, I am more boring: I read a book I’ve been putting aside for weeks, look out the window as slivers of the city pass by, or watch other passengers, examining their outfits and mannerisms, overhearing familial disputes and morning goodbyes, trying to divine where they’re going or who they are.
Let’s be clear, though. Commutes can be, and often are, gruelling. They can be cold, wet, germy, expensive, inaccessible. There is the risk of sexual harassment. Sometimes, there is nowhere to sit. There are delays. I live in a part of Toronto where the transit is better than in other parts of the city. I don’t have to wait at a windy bus station. I work in a hybrid environment where I am encouraged but not obligated to be in the office.
Once in a while, I am hit with a wave of guilt. Perhaps, I should try to type some notes on my laptop. Or maybe I should be reading the latest Very Important Non-fiction Book instead of the novel I’m enjoying. Maybe I should have stayed home and prepared some nutritious oat flour concoction for my son—after all, the influencers say you need just one hour a week to meal-prep seventeen dishes that your kids will definitely eat. This regret is usually fuelled by seeing others around me being productive: finance bros reading self-improvement texts, teaching assistants grading papers, and the man impossibly balancing a computer in his lap and typing seamlessly.
In truth, I am often a little mad when I notice this. Not at the people—I’m sure they have their reasons—but at myself for being lured back into the should-I / shouldn’t-I of being useful. The back and forth is enough to waste fifteen minutes of precious relaxation time, and force me to reckon with my least favourite boundary: saying no to myself. A TikTok therapist would probably tell me to work on that. Maybe they’re right. For now, though, there’s the peace of the train.
