An early start today to get to Łódź for a press conference (about Brexit). Travelling by train today brought back memories of my earliest solo long rail-journeys across the UK when applying for universities. Five journeys (Canterbury, Lancaster, Norwich, Essex and Warwick) at the age of 18, in the late winter and early spring of 1976. I’d pop into the restaurant car for a beer, to enjoy the sensation of travel in an altered state; I’d drift off into a reverie while watching the countryside pass by.
Every form of land travel yields a different experience. Motorcycling is faster than cycling which in turn is faster than walking, but are essentially similar; immersion with the landscape, unseparated from it by the barrier of glass. Driving a car, or being a front-seat passenger, one has the road unrolling ahead, while in a train, the landscape passes laterally, perpendicular to direction of travel. In both cases, the window detaches you from what’s around you – you are watching a movie, rather than being in the movie.
The rail reverie is quite specific, especially on a sunny day – the fields and forests flash by, the landscape changing continually, vista replacing vista. Sunlight on leafless birches, shadows in the furrows of ploughed fields. After a while the “rhythm of the clicketty-clack” makes you sleepy – especially after an early start.
Normal meditation practice is about unshackling your consciousness from day-to-day concerns, focusing on being aware of being; of breathing, of posture, heartbeat, external stimuli kept to a minimum. Being, just being. No distractions, no extraneous thoughts, no intrusions.
Motorcycling requires focus (“never ride faster than you can focus”); you can’t drift away. Neither should you when driving a car. But on a train, you can afford yourself the luxury of doing so. And as you do, travel becomes metaphysical. The landscape becomes timeless. Branch lines diverging off from the main line – where to? Sleepy halts flash by; what’s it like to live here? a rhythm dictated by the infrequent stops of local trains? A few cars waiting outside for passengers returning from town; how was it before the war?
The iron road has been a feature of the human landscape for over 170 years – several generations have had their perspectives widened by the possibility of journeying far from their place of birth. No longer a world with a radius of a day’s horse-ride.
How will the future of travel unfold for us? Will be remain shackled to our planet, or will space travel become as common for mankind as air travel has been for our generations?
Movement too makes me realise this - even when we think we are standing still, when we think we are in the same place - we're not. We are being whirled around on the surface of a rotating lump of rock, orbiting a star, moving through a galaxy that itself is part of a rapidly expanding universe. Nothing is stationary in spacetime. When you fall asleep in your bed this evening, you will wake up in your bed in the morning, but many thousands of miles away.
Your bed is actually on a planet that's spinning (at Warsaw's latitude) at 642 mph (1,033 km/h) while hurtling around the sun at a speed of 66,619 mph (107,230 km/h), and rushing through our galaxy at 515,000 mph (828,000 km/h). The planet's spin you can get your head around, when watching a sunrise or sunset with the Copernican insight that it's not the Sun rising or setting, but the Earth spinning towards or away from its local star. The movement of the Earth around the Sun is only evident through observation of the passing of the seasons. The change from winter to summer on a day-to-day basis is almost imperceptible, but clearly visible on a month-to-month basis. The travel of our solar system through our galaxy, as its spiral arms rotate around the centre, is impossible for us to notice. And yet there it is, calculated by astronomers as moving at half a million miles per hour.
So as you sleep, you have moved more than four million miles from where you were. And as you are carried in your bed at these improbable speeds, you are travelling through oceans of invisible dark matter - does your sleeping consciousness react to it? Does it relay it to you in the form of dreams?
This time last year:
Actively seeking understanding
This time two years ago:
Anacyclosis - what goes round, comes round
This time four years ago:
Winter returned for a morning
This time five years ago:
Globalisation and the politics of identity
This time eight years ago:
More photos from Edinburgh
This time nine years ago:
Edinburgh continues to fascinate
This time ten years ago:
Ealing in bloom - early spring
This time 14 years ago:
Swans arrive in Jeziorki
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