The tracks beneath us

Lets step onto the train of your life. 

I love metaphors, and stories. They explain things in richer ways than direct language is able to do. Language isn’t actually as direct as we think it is. You’ll have noticed this whenever you want to talk about something complex, you have to say it several ways and come at it from different angles. But metaphors, they can carry things language alone can’t—feelings too big or slippery for plain words. That’s why we use stories: they speak to both our logic and our longing.

With that being said, I want to share a metaphor on life, trauma and building the life you really want. This analogy involves a train. The train is your life, every part of your life. If you are into astrology you could have 12 coaches, each representing a different house in the zodiac. You can break the train up anyway you want. 

You are on the train, you are a conscious passenger - maybe even conductor - of your own life. Let’s say you have a lot of trauma from your childhood, it doesn’t matter here the specific events or circumstances of that trauma, just that it exists. This trauma will occupy certain spaces on your train. 

Maybe there are coaches you haven’t visited in years. Ones left dark and cluttered, slowing your journey without you even knowing it. When trauma goes unexamined, it doesn’t just stay still—it rusts the hinges, fogs the glass, warps the tracks.

And maybe you don’t even know that this isn’t what a functioning train looks like. After all you didn’t buy the train, you were just born on it. It was handed to you and for the first years of your life other people were setting it up, kitting it out, loading up the goods, having it serviced, or not. 

There’s a leaking pipe in one of the carriages - the same leak you saw all those years ago. That pipe has always leaked - sometimes the sound is even soothing. Its how the train runs, maybe even a sign that the train is running. You don’t notice the rusting. The hole in the floorboards. That one day, this is what could take down the whole carriage, maybe even the entire train. 

It’s your train now and you will only get off it when you die. Everything on that train is now your responsibility. Your fault? Your doing? No. Not in the beginning anyway. But you have to live here. 

This is what my own trauma has taught me. I found it on the train. It wasn’t pretty, I didn’t like it but I found where it was hiding and was faced with all the damage it was doing to my train, to my life. I got cleaning. I started unpacking things, sometimes tossing it right off the moving train, other times carefully unloading at a station. That part of the train - the cleaned part - it isn’t new. I can still see parts of all that mess and I’ll probably be remodelling for the rest of my life because the damage is done, but I stopped that damage from continuing.

I got it off my train and now I can see a little clearer, travel a little lighter and focus on who I want on my train and where I want that train to go. 

Your career, family, hobbies, friends, projects. They all take space on the train. And we want that, we want to share our journey. I don’t think anyone really wants to travel on an empty train, if you do that’s fine too. But everything needs a kind of place, some things shouldn’t be on top of each other and others need to be more readily accessible. You have to decide all this, organise it and please, for the love of all, enjoy it. 

A train is one of the most popular children’s toys so don’t forget to put fun and games on the train. Joy is just as essential as fuel. Remember that the train itself can just be a toy at times, something with the single purpose of bringing joy and laughter. 

This train isn’t only for survival. It’s also for delight, curiosity, and making up little dances in the dining car just because it feels good.

So much of our life is made up by the stories we tell ourselves. So many of those stories aren’t even conscious. And a lot of the time it is these stories that are doing the driving, that are keeping us on a path that isn’t what we want or doesn’t align with who we thought we would be. But we can remodel, we can course correct and we can learn so many other things to improve our trains. 

Healing isn’t only scrub and repair, at a point you can decorate and that can be completely on your terms. There may be some limitations regarding where you go or what you can get but its possible you could take that train anywhere, so keep your dreaming big when it comes to design, and if you think you’re just not a ‘creative person’, please, there’s no such thing.

Creation is so broad, some may be simpler but any idea brought to life, is creation. If it starts in the mind and we see it in reality, we played a part in that process. We are doing it all the time, this design project is about doing it with intention.

We can never go back, to any point, to any stage. And the train will always be changing. New items, new people, new style. You may get sick of parts, or parts may get damaged, all you can do is take care of the train. 

This analogy could go on forever, finding other people and trains, building bridges, fixing tracks, making turns. But there is one other thing I want to highlight with this metaphor. The tracks. I used the train because tracks are more set than the road - which is open and offers an ‘off roading’ experience. But tracks? Tracks are stable. This to me represents our hardware and our programmed software - Essentially, what we came into the world with and what was given to us before we were able to choose anything.

There are things living in subconscious that are on the train, or blocks on the tracks. But part of our subconscious is the tracks, and what I am trying to get at here is the concept of free will. And how in reality we don’t really have it. Our train and tracks are taking us somewhere that so many programs have already decided. 

So does that make it all pointless? Should we just jump off our trains and succumb to nihilism? I don’t think so. Even if total free will is an illusion and in turn freedom is always just relative, there is still a lot to see on the ride, so many ways in which we can influence that ride and I’m very open to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, once we’ve cleaned enough, lightened the load, and chosen a little more consciously—we might climb up to the top, let the wind rush through our hair, and see where the tracks are ready to take us.