Transition and the subway

If you ride the subway a lot, like I do, you start to notice the way that actually being on the train is like being in an alternate universe. You're not anywhere in particular; the windows usually only reveal dark, blurred tunnel walls, and so there is nothing to compare yourself to, except the walls and floors of the car.

It's not just a physically ambiguous place. It also has its own social rules. Once I saw Tom Green do a bit on a Japanese train--he yelled at the top of his lungs: "Who likes bananas?!?!" but no one even looked at him. It was as if he didn't exist. Granted, the rules for the US aren't quite so strict (I don't think) but the other day on the train we had some drunk sports fans having fun in the middle of an evening commute. The train had a particularly charged atmosphere--danger and adventure. Normally, though, no-one speaks or makes eye contact. The space is different: it is in-between space.

I saw a movie called "Jacob's Ladder" a few years ago. In the beginning of it, a soldier in Vietnam is shot in the belly. He wakes up on a subway train, tormented by strange voices outside. This becomes something of a metaphor for death.

If you want to get fatalistic, in fact, you can think of life as being one long train ride--you just don't know when your last stop is, is all. But transition is the constant, not the aberration. So what this suggests to me is that life is about learning to live with transition. And not only that, but possibly even to exploit or enjoy it. If change is the constant, so to speak, then living well is living well with change. Similarly, the transition--death--to what comes after life can be made well if we are practiced at the art of transition. Dying well, in other words, requires using the lessons of transition in life to face the ultimate change in our reality.