The Train I Missed On Purpose

I took the train to Ventura for a meeting.

The plan was simple. Arrive, meet, return. A clean line through the day. The train would carry me home, where my computer, my desk, and the objectives I had assigned myself were waiting.

It would have been easy to follow the plan.

Appropriate, even.

Instead, I wandered.

Ventura is only twenty minutes south, close enough that I should know it better, but I do not. Proximity can create a false sense of familiarity. We pass a place on the highway, recognize its name on a sign, stop there once for lunch, and begin to believe we have been there.

I had been to Ventura.

I had not walked through it without somewhere else to be.

That afternoon, I gave myself the day. No judgment about where I was going, why I was going there, what I might find, or when I needed to be finished. I walked without trying to turn the walk into an accomplishment.

This is more difficult than it sounds.

We are trained to account for our hours. A meeting has a purpose. A train has a destination. Even leisure is often scheduled, optimized, photographed, or made to justify itself. We rarely allow ourselves to move through a place without asking the experience to explain why it deserves our time.

Wandering has no argument prepared in its defense.

You turn because something catches your eye. You enter because a door is open. You stay because someone inside is doing something you have never seen before. We often believe this needs to be in the romantic cities on the other side of elsewhere, but minutes away is all we really need.

I began taking pictures.

Not because I had arrived somewhere remarkable, but because the ordinary had started to rearrange itself.

An old lounge sign rose above the sidewalk. A weathered leather-shop sign stepped into the street. A painted parrot announced Ghirardelli ground chocolate from a brick wall. The images felt both new and familiar. I knew the materials, the brick, paint, glass, metal, stucco. I knew the shape of an old downtown and the imperfect dignity of signs that had outlived the businesses or eras that made them.

But I had not seen these things here.

Not in this arrangement.

Not on this day.

Freshness does not always come from encountering something entirely new. Sometimes it comes from meeting the familiar without expectation. The world gives you known elements in a different order, and suddenly you are awake again.

I found clothing boutiques with hip owners that ride Indians on weekends, working the weekday quiet. I found small cafés serving wonderful morsels. There was a hair salon tucked deep inside an alleyway, the kind of place you could pass a hundred times without knowing it was there. I made a mental note to return for my next coiffure.

Then I wandered into a music store.

Instruments crowded the walls while the owner worked beneath a magnifying glass. He was attaching tiny wires to a pickup that would eventually serve some sixteen-year-old kid trying to jam furiously in a bedroom or garage.

The future noise depended on patience.

A steady hand.

Two thin wires meeting exactly where they should.

I stood there watching, still believing I had entered without a reason.

Then I saw the harmonicas.

I knew who they were for.

My favorite musician.

It occurred to me that perhaps this was why I had walked through that particular door. Not why I had taken the train, or why I had missed the one home, but why I had entered that shop at that moment.

Wandering does not always leave you without purpose.

Sometimes it carries you toward a purpose you could not have planned because you had not yet felt it.

I bought the harmonicas.

The train I was supposed to take came and went.

I missed it on purpose, I suppose, though I did not announce the decision even to myself. I simply kept walking, even tried jogging on old knees, until returning on schedule was no longer possible.

There was a small freedom in that.

The day had departed from its assigned route, so there was nothing left to protect. I no longer had to hurry toward the version of the afternoon I had planned. I could enter the one that was actually happening.

I arrived at the local theater only moments before an improv competition began.

Improvisation is an appropriate reward for missing a train.

People walked onto a stage without knowing exactly what would happen next. They accepted what was offered, listened to one another, and built a temporary world from whatever arrived. The scenes worked when no one tried too hard to control them.

The afternoon had been doing the same thing.

A meeting became a walk. A walk became a sequence of doors. A music store became a gift. A missed train became a theater seat.

Afterward, I moseyed toward the station.

Even then, the day was not finished revealing itself.

I came upon an outdoor gathering with tacos, pizza, palms lit against the night, colored lanterns, and a Grateful Dead cover band playing on the side lot.

People stood near the stage or sat at tables, eating, talking, listening. No one appeared to be in a hurry.

The scene was new to me, but not foreign.

I knew the music. I knew the easy disorder of people gathered beneath outdoor lights. I knew the pleasure of arriving somewhere after dark and realizing that the night had been going on without you. When in doubt, twirl.

Again, familiar pieces.

A new arrangement.

I could have been home hours earlier.

I could have returned to my computer, my desk, and the satisfying illusion that the day had been used correctly.

Instead, I was standing in a place I had not intended to find, listening to songs I already knew, carrying harmonicas for someone I loved.

What I discovered in Ventura was not only a hidden salon, a music shop, an improv theater, or a side lot filled with food and music. Those were simply the visible things.

What I discovered was myself without an objective.

Calm.

Relaxed.

Interested.

I liked the person moving through that afternoon. He was not producing anything. He was not solving a problem or meeting a deadline. He was not trying to improve the experience by naming what it meant while it was still happening.

He was simply there.

There are days when discipline is necessary. Trains must be caught. Work must be completed. Other people are counting on us.

But there are also days when discipline becomes a kind of blindness.

Efficiency narrows the frame. It teaches us to remove what does not serve the objective. The detour. The alleyway. The old sign. The conversation without an outcome. The shop we had no reason to enter.

Wandering allows those things back in.

The camera gave me a way to notice them. The photographs were not proof that I had been somewhere. They were proof that I had looked.

That may be what a day like this restores.

Not productivity.

Not escape.

Contact.

It reminds us that the familiar is not exhausted. That there are streets near us we have never really walked. That a wall, a sign, or a shop can become new when we arrive without a conclusion.

It reminds us that purpose is not always something we carry into the day.

Sometimes it is waiting behind a door.

Sometimes it looks like a man bent over a magnifying glass.

Sometimes it sounds like a sixteen-year-old making too much noise.

Sometimes it fits in your pocket.

And sometimes the distance between one date and the next is measured by the train you did not take.