If ever there was a sentence that I couldn’t imagine myself thinking, this was one of them and yet it’s the one I could hear running through my head at approximately 8.45 this morning. I had to travel across the county for work on a bus that should have long ago been condemned to the scrap yard and some little spark in my head raised the little thought in my head … I’ve got an hour and a half to kill, I could do a little meditation on the bus. Genius.
Each slow breath I took was immaculately timed with the lurch of the bus and my intense focus, entirely detracted from the horrors of the journey, even to the extent that I didn’t notice the youth who looked like a young Richard E Grant who got on the bus shortly after me, smelling quite strongly of marijuana (Dude, seriously, it wasn’t even 9am – what gives?) at least until I’d finished.
Sure, it’s a hazard of doing something that is best performed in peace and quiet in crowded, public spaces but that’s the thing. This is life and life’s not perfect. Sometimes you need to take those moments wherever you can find them and if you can find them for ten minutes on a bus, amongest the noise and chatter and smell, then you can find them anywhere.
Sometimes it’s easier to settle yourself away from the world and blissfully trip away to a calmer, more transquil headspace and we all need that from time to time, however we find it. But sometimes we don’t get that time and space. Sometimes life gets a rush on and we’re ‘too busy’ to be thinking about taking those ten minutes for ourselves.
But you can always carve out a little time, whether it’s meditating in front of a slot machine in Vegas or on a bus in the middle of Somerset, sometimes you’ve just got to take a moment and find your centre while the craziness whirls and eddies around you. It’s still going to be there in 10, 20 or 30 minutes time.
As for maybe looking a little crazy … hell, I live near Glastonbury. No-one’s going to bat an eyelid!
Today I went to a photo shoot with Venture Studios, which was a 30th Birthday present from my sister (she’s such an inspired wee genius!) and had the MOST fun and the doggies were SOOOO well behaved. Getting dressed this morning was a thought provoking experience and I’ll tell you why.
The studio had suggested wearing and bringing along props that were reflective of your personality and interests. So as I was dragging on my clothes this morning, I automatically reached for a pair of odd socks (can you say that?) for good luck and that got me thinking of the small, almost unconscious, things that we do that make unique in ways we don’t even notice.
My odd sock habit has its depths in my University days, when I would catch the bus in to lectures when the weather was grim and I didn’t fancy a four mile hike in the rain. The bus stop was a five minute walk away across a field, and the buses were often double deckers or bendy buses that jammed us together like sardines. At any rate, I had a spate of bad luck on the buses in my first year, when I consistently fell down, got pushed over or some other calamity (see reasons why I hate buses, many of these ocurred during that fortnight) would befall me whenever I was on a bus. It lasted about 2 weeks, and at the end of the fortnight, I had bruises on bruises and could cheerfully have done without seeing a bus ever again. I was, in fact, on the verge of turning in my bus pass completely.
One fine day, I overslept and when I woke up and realised the time, I grabbed whatever clothes were to hand (I must have made a fine sight!) and threw them on including a pair of odd socks and headed for the bus stop and found, to my undisguised delight, that I had not only an uneventful journey but that I made my lecture with minutes to spare. I could only put this unlikely ocurrance down to the odd socks (or blind luck) and ever since, if I’ve felt the need for a little extra luck, I’ve worn mismatched socks. (Clearly I should have remembered to do that on evil, everything sucks Tuesday, shouldn’t I?)
What quirky habits do you have?
Tags: I'm not quirky, it's perfectly rational, My Dogs Would Give The Hound Of The Baskervilles a Run For His Money, The Good Ole Days
Posted by Elemental Grace on Jan 27, 2010 in
Planes Trains and Automobiles 
I was working out of town today. Waaay out of town and it required catching the BUS (Oh yes, capitals are very necessary … read on)
Now, I HATE buses. Loathe them and not just for the fact that they make you feel like you ate 15 donuts and then invited a small child to play trampoline of your stomach while simultaneously hitting you over the head with a brick. On top of the fact that once you’re ten minutes into the journey and feeling like a barely contained nausea whirlpool, there seems to be a tacit agreement that rather than open the windows and circulate a little fresh air, it would be infinitely preferable to sit squashed up together with condensation streaming down the windows and share the fetid and stale odours of BO, urine, sweat, leftover food and drink and numerous other smells to unpleasant to contemplate. It’s an unrivalled olfactory experience.
I could sense that I was being given an opportunity for sensory exploration today so, it shouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest that my driver was a non English-speaking version of Lurch from the Addams Family, with a propensity for taking sharp corners and narrow one-track country roads at a minimum of 60mph and braking violently and swerving into hedges and shallow ditches to avoid colliding into oncoming vehicles. I’d be preared to swear that I saw a woman and her dog leap into the hedge for safety as the bus roared around the corner of an otherwise quiet single track road. A parked vehicle has never made me feel more scared.
As people piled on at the first stop, there was the inevitable bagging of double seats as you pray quietly to yourself that the bus isn’t going to fill up and someone doesn’t want to take the spare seat next to you. But naturally, you find that as the other double seats are taken, options become more limited and new travellers are examining the spare seats and evaluating which of you is going to be the least unpleasant to sit next to and you know …. you just KNOW that you’re coming up on the relatively harmless list and in a very short space of time, you’ll end up with someone plonked next to you. Sometimes you get lucky, and it’s a nice old lady or gent that you can pass the time of day with but you know that more often than not, it’s going to be someone else. I have an uncanny knack of attracting those ‘other’ sorts.
Historically, they’ve included:
- The one who sat across the aisle from me and kept twitching who took umbridge with my looking out the window and appeared to think I was staring AT her. So she started hitting me with her umbrella and then spat on my head. Which was lovely. She got dragged off the bus by her carer and then JUMPED BACK ON to hit me again!
- The drunken man who spent an hour and a half roaring football songs at the top of his lungs, belching out lager fumes and calling me an uptight bitch for not joining in
- The woman with the endlessly screaming baby that puked all over the bus floor. (Imagine the noise and the smell for an hour and a half, while you yourself are fighting the rising tides of nausea)
- The woman who, offended by my large bag on a crowded bus punched me in the stomach and kicked me in the knee.
- The ‘larger’ gentleman who took up a seat and a half so that I was wedged on one hip into a small gap to avoid his excess bulk resting on my lap, while he stuck his elbows in my face because he had to hold the newspaper up to read it.
- The ubiquitous chav or chavette, who always makes for a pleasant companion, especially those with the loud and tinny speakers for their music and my personal favourite:
- The achoholic, who at 8.30 in the morning is swigging gin from a hip flask and isn’t overly cautious about spillages, as you’re praying that you don’t arrive at work soaked head to toe in gin and smelling as if you came in straight from the pub you were in the night before.
Maybe next time, I’ll cycle, or hitch a lift. Or perhaps I’ll just dose myself to the eyeballs with a sedative and sleep all the way there and hope they chuck me off at the right stop. Perhaps if I offer to tie myself to the roof ….?
Tags: Some days I wish I hadn't got out of bed