The Thing About Trains… It Doesn’t Matter Where They’re Going

Caroline Watkins
Caroline Watkins

 . . .  What matters is deciding to get on.”

I laughed out loud when I heard this line spoken by the conductor in “The Polar Express,” which I watched for the first time over Christmas. I was familiar with the book, which I am reasonably sure I read to at least my youngest child. I have paraphrased this line to several friends since.

I knew I had to write about it, but nothing came to me until this morning when a memory bubbled up.

The sound of a train has always both haunted and comforted me. I grew up on a farm through which railroad tracks ran. As kids we thought it the height of adventure to place pennies on the tracks and watch what happened to them after the train roared passed while crouched in dangerously close proximity.

The last two houses I have lived in have had trains running alongside the respective neighborhoods which I, of course, haven’t minded in the slightest.

Now to get back on track (pun intended).

Years ago I traveled to Switzerland to climb the Matterhorn with a friend. Due to a variety of circumstances including ill-fitting equipment, the first commercial death on the mountain in some 40 years and resources dwindled by a training climb up the Rimpfischhorn, we decided to take a pause in the game and explore other parts of the country.

A critical moment arrived a few days later at a train station when it was time to either return to Zermatt or make a previously unplanned visit to my sister, Mary and her family in Germany. Our timetable could not accommodate doing both.

The decision was made to accomplish our set-forth goal of climbing the infamous peak which rises to 14,692 feet above sea level. But just after giving my sister this news over the phone, I burst in to tears. As the train pulled away from the station for Germany, we abruptly changed course and started sprinting toward that one.

Upon purchasing our tickets from a rather disapproving German “conductor”, I immediately felt a sense of peace. You can say that I’m not terribly goal-oriented or ambitious. You can say that it was the wisdom of the heart or nudge from the Holy Spirit to change directions. It nevertheless turned out to be a defining moment, one I wouldn’t recognize as such until many years later.

I would need to trust the nudges when they came.

I saw another film over Christmas with my son, a documentary entitled “The Happy Movie” at the end of which a man named Andy Wymer was interviewed. He formerly was a self-described “ambitious fellow,” a successful bank manager who made AND spent a lot of money. For the last 17 years, however, he has volunteered at Mother Teresa’s home for the sick, destitute and dying in Calcutta which has made him blissfully . . .  happy.

Many of the people he serves have been retrieved from either garbage dumps or interestingly, railway station platforms. He has discovered that these people need to know four things:  that they are loved by God, their life is precious, they are not forgotten and that someone cares. He talks about the sweetness in taking a bit of someone else’s burden and helping them carry it, and he summarizes his extraordinary experience with this statement:

“My life is like a loan from God, and I will give this loan back – but with interest.”

How beautiful! Mr. Wymer figuratively jumped on a train, mid-life and in keeping with the message from a Ted Talk (on stress actually), the train was one on which he “chased meaning” as opposed to remaining at the station and “trying to avoid discomfort.”

Fear of discomfort and of making the wrong decision can keep us, I believe, from a life of real meaning and significance. And from being written into the Larger Story with an ending we cannot see.

Sometimes we just have to get on the train and believe – the seeing comes along the way.

– Caroline Watkins

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