Thirty Years of Waiting for Trains, and Only in Retirement Did I Learn That Waiting Is Not Sitting Still

The train isn't here yet.

For thirty years I said that to myself every time I sat down on the stool in the keeper's hut. It took until my first Tuesday morning of meditation for me to hear that I was still saying it.

That day my daughter set an old alarm clock for three minutes. I had carried a chair with a back out into the yard, put my hands on my knees, and kept my eyes open on the brick floor. The teapot by my foot was still giving off steam.

By the second minute my neck had turned toward the end of the lane. Shoulders tight, ears reaching. I was listening for the crossing bell. And there is no bell in my yard.

I kept a railway crossing for almost thirty years and have been retired for three. It was the first time I had sat down with no train to wait for, and it turned out my body did not know how to do that. This piece is about that, for anyone whose work was waiting, or who is learning to sit still and keeps feeling they are waiting for something they cannot name.

Not Waiting for Something to Arrive

Before I sat, I thought meditation was a kind of duty shift. You sit until your mind goes quiet, until that lightness people talk about shows up, and only then is the shift over.

There is no train. Nobody rings the bell, and nobody comes to relieve you. Three minutes is three minutes, and whether the lightness comes or not, you have still sat. If you want a gentler start for the very first time, a three-minute meditation for your first sit says it better than I can.

How Is Waiting for a Train Different From Sitting Still?

My hut was about two square meters. A wooden stool, a small table for the handover logbook, a chipped enamel teapot, a radio always turned low. The bell hung on the post by the door, and when it rang I got up and cranked the barrier arm down. I knew the passenger trains by heart. Freight came whenever it liked, and when a long freight went through I counted the wagons to stay awake.

That kind of waiting has a destination. The whole body leans toward the next train. When it passes, you ease off for a moment, then lean toward the one after. After thirty years of that, the lean became how I rested without noticing.

That evening I told my daughter.

— Dad, three minutes, and it felt like a whole shift. I kept listening.

— For what?

— I don't know. Something about to arrive.

— Nothing is about to arrive, Dad.

She was right, and that was the strange part.

At first I blamed my age. Old now, and a retired man feels the hollow, and sitting idle lets the thoughts wander. But thinking it over, my head has fewer things in it than when I worked. In the hut I had to watch the timetable, watch the kid on the bicycle who slipped under the arm, watch the books. In the yard there is nothing to watch.

The difficulty is somewhere else. My body is waiting for something it is sure will come, and nothing comes in a meditation. When you wait, time has a handle: the train passes and one stretch is done. When you sit still, no stretch ever gets done, the old marker is gone, and the gap feels like a job left undone. That is only my guess, and I don't know whether people in other trades feel the same. My wife sold things at the market all her life, and she says she can sit still, except she keeps getting up in the middle to tidy.

There is one thing I still cannot explain. On the sixth afternoon I sat right when the passenger train usually went through, and my neck turned toward the lane earlier than on any other day, before I had thought anything at all. My house is miles from the tracks. Yet at that hour my body still remembered.

What I found by fumbling for a few days goes like this. Sit down on a chair with a back, both feet on the floor. Instead of letting my ears reach toward the lane, I put my attention on the soles of my feet, and whether the bricks today felt cool or a little warm. Whenever I caught my neck turning toward the end of the lane, I said quietly, "no train," and went back to the feet. Two minutes is enough, eyes open or closed as you like, and if you feel dizzy or your knee hurts, stand up and walk a few steps and leave it there. For how to sit so it hurts less, any posture will do, except one says it more clearly than I did.

How do I know I did it right? Not by feeling quiet. By the lean: some days I noticed my shoulders had dropped before I had told them to. The first day, none of that. My feet held my attention for about three breaths and then my ears pricked toward the lane again, a dozen times in two minutes. By the fourth or fifth day there were sittings when I forgot the lane entirely, and sittings that were just like the first, and I could not predict which was which. On a rushed day, cut it to one round: sit, put attention on both feet, say "no train," stand up. Ten seconds.

I slipped up on the second day. After a lifetime of keeping shifts, I treated three minutes as a shift: a time to clock in, a time to clock out, and no rest until the hours were done. That day I raised it to twenty minutes so it would look serious. My knee hurt in the first ten. In the next ten I counted the minutes like wagons on a long freight. Afterward I lay down on the bed, and for three days in a row I did not sit.

What tripped me was the very thing I was good at. The job taught me that every task has a shift and every shift must be filled. Meditation has nobody to sign that you filled it. Three minutes, two minutes, or standing up halfway because your foot has gone numb are all fine, and it took me three days to believe it.

Who Signs the Book When You Finish Sitting?

"Was that good enough? No. Terrible sitting. Fine, tomorrow again."

Those lines ran through my head the moment the alarm rang, before I had even stood up.

At the end of every shift I handed over: opened the book, wrote the time, wrote the last train, wrote "line clear, barrier up," and signed. Twenty-some years of habit. So after meditating I signed the book too, only with a score. Today a seven. Today a failure. On days when my head jumped about, I crossed out the whole sitting.

My daughter heard that and asked.

— Why do you grade it, Dad? Nobody's making you.

— True. Nobody is.

— Then who reads the score?

I could not answer.

I had thought grading was how I would know whether I was doing it right, so I could do better next time. Thinking back, the score taught me nothing. On the "seven" day I did not know why seven. On the "failure" day I did not know where I had failed, because I did not know what a correct sitting looks like. When I asked my daughter, she said she did not know either. I left that not-knowing as it was, and have not patched it with anything.

What I see more clearly is that the score is another train. With no train left to wait for, I had invented one for the end of each sitting, waiting to see how many points I got. My body still leaned forward. It had only renamed the marker.

My daughter gave me a small hardcover notebook, and I went back to the old way, minus the grading.

The first line I wrote was "sat three minutes, poor." The word "poor" slipped out, I crossed it out and rewrote it as "three minutes, right foot numb, the baguette seller's loudspeaker in the lane." "Numb" was allowed, because it was something that happened. For the first days every line looked about the same and I was a little bored. Two weeks later I flipped back and it was all roosters, loudspeakers, a numb foot, and yet each morning came back as that morning and no other. My wife tried it for three days, found it a nuisance, and quit, and I did not press her. On rushed days, three words.

I slipped here once more. One day I picked up the pen and wrote two whole pages, "today my mind was quiet, I thought of old things and they were not heavy." Reading it again I saw that "quiet" is also a score, in a different coat. Since then I hold myself to one line, and when the line is full I close the book, even if I want to write more. And if every line of yours comes out as "nothing at all," what if nothing happens when I sit, did it fail speaks to exactly that spot.

If You Have Tried for a Few Days and Nothing Seems to Happen

Mr. Sáu from across the lane, a bricklayer, heard my story and gave it a try. Three days later he stopped by the yard for tea.

— I can't sit, my friend. Empty hands feel like a kid being made to stand still.

— How long did you manage?

— A minute and a half, and it felt like a whole afternoon.

For forty years his hands had held a trowel, and left empty they asked for work. I told him to try walking slowly from the gate to the end of the lane and back, putting his attention on his feet the way I put mine on the soles when sitting. Watch the road and the traffic, I said, this lane has plenty of motorbikes. He said walking he could do, sitting not. I did not see anything wrong with that. Same thing, different way of doing it.

There is another thing few people mention. Some mornings after sitting I felt empty, and the emptiness was closer to sadness than to ease. Retired, no train left that needs me to crank the barrier, and thinking of that is heavy too. I do not know where it comes from and I will not guess. If that sadness is heavy, lasts for weeks, or makes everyday things hard to do, it is something to bring to a doctor or a counselor, or to your children. Meditation is not the place to carry it alone.

This morning I sat again. Teapot by my foot, the soles of my feet on bricks still a little cool. Out in the lane the bread seller's loudspeaker drove past and faded.

Not my train.

This article was created with AI assistance.