Life is a dice roll
450+
On a train to Burgos. You are listening to Jim Gaffigan, an American comedian, and pressing your face to the window in search of castles I have promised.
There’s a school group of kids your age all around us. Their teacher is sitting next to me as I write this. They are Basque, speaking a language which has no known roots. It is unlike French, Spanish, German, English, a language that is thought to date back to the neolithic, or even older. They laugh and muck around like normal kids though and, as I watch the boys I wonder, are they like you? Are you like them? This is a question that opens outwards like a flowering plant, but it’s a plant with thorns because it makes me think of why we have brought you here.
So why have we? To get you off screens. To challenge you to do something difficult. To give you calf muscles and put you in your body, not your brain. To spend time together as though it was a resource, something quantifiable and measurable, able to be held and moulded. To take ourselves out of our routines and into the world. To do all this with you before you become a teenager and slowly slip from our grasp.
The train is a detox from two days of flying and sitting in airports. I feel my body returning to earth at speed, landscapes flashing past, horizontally stretched out before us. On the flight these places were held below, out of reach, out of conception, but now they are getting closer, almost within touch. Like you I press my face to the glass. It’s warm from the sun which is baking the rock, fields and cliff walls. We pass through a gorge with a river at its base and I want to get out and walk but that won’t happen for another couple of hours when we arrive in Burgos. I touch the glass. My forehead is warmed by it.
I am slowing. Literally. Metaphorically.
The pace of me, of my life, my thoughts. The distance we have crossed, three flights, three continents, Singapore for a night then Istanbul for several hours, then Barcelona overnight and now here, on this train. It’s as if we have been catapulted across the globe, shot from a cannon, torpedoed from our usual selves, and now we are losing momentum as the trains tips the world on its axis and us, like a dice roll, tumbling out of it, down valleys, across rocky plains (with the possibility of castles), rolling free of the habits and routines that have calcified around us and now have the chance of breaking free as we are deposited on the other side of the globe, losing our momentum, our impetus, and landing finally, inevitably, onto our feet.
This is a long way to travel in order to just slow down and walk.
Next to me the teacher is exasperated with her kids. Across the aisle your mother is equally frustrated with you asking for her phone to play some dumb shark game. Both women sigh heavily at the same moment, expressing a weight of responsibility that suddenly reaches further than this carriage. I feel guilty for leaving the bargaining to your Mum to deal with so I offer to swap positions, to give her the chance to press her head to the glass and watch the landscape flash past. She declines, just for the record.
Another teacher, another woman, enters the carriage and offers the teacher next to me a coffee. They talk. It’s fast and I’m left unsure whether they are speaking Spanish or Basque, but I see the solidarity they have together, the support. The same support they offer these children, despite the weight it affords them.
It makes me think of my Mum, also a primary school teacher, and of the way she allowed me to shape myself, never forcing a direction, just giving me the space to find my own. She gave me freedom but also support in case I fell when I reached outwards into the dark, which I often did. Which I still do. For what else is life except a blind reaching? A seeking of meaning when there is none, always a movement forward, hands out in front, tentative but tenacious, delicately poised, almost off balance. Only ever a single moment from falling.
And I wonder, what is the cost of all this blind groping? How has my motion forward impacted others, these women for instance, that for some reason, when everything tells them they no longer have to, still offer support to blind and stupid men.
