Back in the 80s, the boffins at Birmingham Airport (BHX) invented a floating train that could shuttle passengers from the airport to their departure gates.
It was called the MagLev, a portmanteau word describing just how they got the train to float; magnetic levitation.
So, whilst your average train ground along on its rails, screeching and shunting, our MagLev rose above all that, hovering above the rails thanks to a powerful reverse polarity in the opposing magnets. I rode it once as a child and it was a serene and frictionless experience.
It was the future.
There’s often a great difference between where we’d like to be in our lives, and where we actually find ourselves.
When I started writing this blog, I felt very clearly that I’d like to be a published writer. As the days passed, however, I found the solitude of being shut up in my house day in and day out, motivating myself to push forward with my dream tiring and demoralising.
It wasn’t the writing that was a problem, that was mostly heaven – it was the remorseless marketing and manoeuvring required to get myself out there, to distinguish myself from all the other voices, to be heard, that I found tiring – the moving and shaking and hustling that absolutely in no way comes naturally to me. I lack resilience, too, taking setbacks hard. If I was a rat, I would put it down to not being sufficiently licked by my mother in the first 12 hours of my life.
When I returned to my place of work last week, by contrast, I loved the bonhomie and sense of a shared experience of being around other people. I loved the sense of belonging, even if that meant belonging to a rat-infested, tumble-down adult education community hub on the lawless fringes of a neighbourhood frequently coming in the top 10 of England’s most deprived and hideously dubbed by some apparatchik as a super output area. I liked the requirement to be in a physical location at a certain time after so many months of lockdown. And, I’m a little ashamed to admit this, I liked being told what to do, rather than having to hoof it, day after day.
Three months after beginning this project then, not only do I feel in no way nearer to my goal, I’m now even less certain about what I want to do with my life.
And this writer is in his forties.
Sitting at my desk then yesterday morning, I felt furious with myself, ashamed of my manifest and myriad failures. Not only was there a yawning gulf between where I was and where I wanted to be, I was now no longer even sure where it was that I wanted to be, damnit.
It was a painful experience, like the heavy weight of a freight train grinding along on unoiled rails, howling and scuffing and showering the tracks with angry incandescent sparks.
But then I remembered the MagLev and how its magnetic buffer floats the train off its tracks.
And I remembered mercy.
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