Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of train videos on YouTube.
Model trains. Mountain-climbing cogwheel trains. Disneyland’s steam train. Japanese suspended monorails. The Hogwarts Express. Lego sets affixed with GoPros zooming throughout living rooms and terrorizing housecats.
I’ve been fascinated by trains ever since I was little. One entire bedroom of my childhood home was dominated by a miniature town whose primary mode of transportation was an illuminated four-car passenger train. Not that the citizens could actually go anywhere—there was only one station.
Naturally, everything lit up. I remember turning off the lights and staring at the thing for hours on end. (If I still had it, I’d stare at it as an adult, too. In fact, I’d probably already be decorating it for Halloween.)
I’d love to travel across the country via train. One with a sleeper cabin, and preferably a shower. It would be a long trip.
Until that dream becomes manifest, YouTube is free, so my mind and spirit can travel any time I wish. Being something of a nomad by nature, my sense of wanderlust is ignited by views of sweeping vistas rolling leisurely past the cabin windows. I breathe deeply, existing in a space where time is marked only by meals and sunsets, and conversations are timeless.
I imagine simply being, my mind unencumbered by the distracting rhythms and patterns that permeate (and often irritate) my normal, rail-less existence.
The destination isn’t important. Arrival schedules are irrelevant. The outside world becomes part of another life, another place; mere trivialities circumvented by a magical length of transcendent track.
It isn’t a highway that leads to Heaven...it’s a railroad.
