The most common response to my living in New Jersey and commuting to Brooklyn is some combination of a smile (laugh?), amazement and then pity. I can’t say this didn’t make me nervous before we moved. For the last seven years my commute was anywhere from 3-5 minutes, depending on how many red lights I came across. Now, two months into my commute (45-55 minutes in the morning, and 80-100 minutes on the way home), I have to admit that I’m doing fine. Not only do I not mind it, I often quite enjoy it. Between phone calls, podcasts, audiobooks and music, it’s rarely a drain.
Maybe because I was so concerned about making sure I had something to keep me engaged, I didn’t think about another aspect of a long commute – thinking. The irony of having a 3 minute commute to work is that, between life at work and home life, there was little time to think. I don’t mean I didn’t think at all. Just that there wasn’t time, or more accurately, chunks of time, set aside to let my mind go for long periods of time. There wasn’t time for sustained, aimless thinking. I realized something of this early in my Netivot job. At Associated I had a 15 minute commute, and I was conscious of this giving me time to decompress and reflect on my way home, and I felt the loss when I changed jobs, even as I never did anything to actively recapture that time.
Now, the long commute has changed that (even if it is perhaps as an over-correction). I’ve gone entire rides without turning on Spotify or a podcast, as I work through a thorny problem whose answer couldn’t come easily during a busy day (or night). Or sometimes I just try to be with the quiet and see what bubbles up.
I am, coincidentally, in the middle of a book by Matthew Crawford called Why We Drive: Philosophy of the Open Road. I picked it up because I loved one of his previous books, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford is a deep thinker around the mind-body relationship, and the way in which humans function better when we get out of our head. Here’s what he wrote:
There is a subtle form of release (while driving)… from a pressure that is harder to define. If your commute is going smoothly, it doesn’t take up much of your awareness, leaving you free to daydream or engage in other forms of useless reverie. This type of driving is not very demanding, yet you are absolved of all the obligation to be doing something else. How often is that the case?… Traffic may be slow, but if it is flowing smoothly you are moving forward, and this seems to be enough to calm the time-guilt of modern life…. The near automaticity of this task requires just enough of your peripheral awareness, and boldily intervention, to give you the feeling that you are doing something necessary, and therefore you are left free. (italics are the author’s, pages 40-41).
Free. To think. It’s a space that’s not constructed or planned for, that’s open, even empty.
So – enjoy your next ride!