The Quiet Commute Without Earbuds
Leave the earbuds in your pocket for once, and the journey you have made a hundred times turns out to have been holding things back.
The commute is the part of the day we have agreed, collectively, to abolish. We fill it with podcasts and playlists and the endless scroll, anything to make the dead time feel less dead. The earbuds go in before we leave the house, and they stay in until we arrive, sealing us off from the bus, the platform, the walk, the other people doing exactly the same thing.
For a long time I did this without thinking. Then one morning the battery was flat, and I had to make the journey unaccompanied, and I noticed how strange and roomy it suddenly felt.
The world turns its volume up
The first thing that returns is sound. Not music, the actual sound of the place: the particular squeal of these brakes, the gulls if you are near the coast, a snatch of someone else's phone call, the rhythm of your own footsteps on a familiar stretch of pavement. None of it is interesting, exactly. That is rather the point.
With nothing piped into your ears, the journey stops being a tunnel between two places and becomes a place in itself. You start to see the route rather than endure it: the house with the absurd topiary, the cafe that changes hands every few months, the tree that is always slightly ahead of the others in spring.
A licence to think
The deeper gift of the quiet commute is mental rather than sensory. We have very few stretches of the day now where the mind is allowed to idle, and idling is when the useful thoughts arrive. The half-formed idea, the thing you had meant to say, the realisation that a problem you had been worrying at has quietly solved itself.
Constant audio crowds all that out. There is always another voice talking, another song beginning, no gap for your own thoughts to surface into. Take the earbuds out and the gap reappears, and the mind, given room, starts to wander somewhere worthwhile.
Boredom is not the enemy of a good idea. It is usually the doorway.
On letting it be dull
I should be honest: the quiet commute is sometimes boring, and that is fine. Not every moment needs to be optimised for input. There is a particular kind of rest in being mildly under-stimulated, in looking out of a train window at fields you have seen a thousand times and thinking about nothing in particular.
We have grown frightened of this small dullness, treating every empty minute as a problem to be solved with content. But the unfilled commute teaches you that you can simply be somewhere, going from one place to another, without needing the moment to entertain you.
Keeping a little of it back
You need not abandon the earbuds entirely. The morning radio is a comfort; a good podcast can turn a grim wet platform into something almost pleasant. But you might consider leaving them out for one leg of the journey, one direction, one day a week, just to keep the channel open.
The commute is going to happen whether you notice it or not. Reclaiming even a little of it, unaccompanied and slightly bored, gives you back a small daily window that you had quietly handed away. It turns out there was rather a lot going on in there all along.