I always enjoyed trains. What seems now to be treated as a meme of neurodivergence is actually not an uncommon trait.
Ask around, and many people will tell you they find trains relaxing or soothing in some intangible way. With due exceptions, like crowdedness or Italian delays, there is some comfort in moving while being still.
There is something pleasing for our sense of cohesion when we sit in a train and look outside: it merges our need to move and our need to stay. With the satisfaction of being headed somewhere without having to do much about it, we can find a different form of stillness.
Restlessness is a stuck movement or fidgety stillness. Something that went wrong in the process of integration of the two. Gabor Mate in his book Scattered Minds uses an example that explains this elegantly. If there’s a lot of traffic and the traffic light doesn’t work, that mess turns into an activated, frustrating and purposeless stillness. Stuff keeps coming in, and the lack of resources to handle it turns everything into restlessness. Potential movement never satisfied.
If intention is not directed and channeled, no movement nor stillness exist. A frozen state doesn’t allow staying nor leaving, comfort nor exploration. So the body loses its potential, the mind loses focus and drive, the person loses herself.
It’s often counterintuitive how something like amphetamines could calm restlessness or aimlessness in ADHD patients. Something activating by definition relieves the symptoms of hyperactivity or distraction. How? By channeling energies that get wasted instead. Let’s not fall into the trap of calling things a “waste” or “lazy” in the traditional sense. Waste is not about failing in our goals of productivity. Waste is not about misusing or not using our skills. Waste is not in relation to producing or consuming according to the not so veiled requirements of our culture. Waste means: so much is invested into a goal or a purpose, whether mentally (with draining rumination and guilt) or practically (with planning, postponing, canceling) and nothing is accomplished in that direction, nor it’s accepted to just quit and invest energies elsewhere. A frozen state of maybes where peace is never found, and resolution isn’t either.
Too much movement, like in a hamster wheel, that becomes a delusional and never ending still here. Over and over and over.
In many psychological disorders we can find some form of derailed going or derailed staying.
Anxiety: I can’t stop predicting, I’m always in the future.
Depression: I can’t move. Today, tomorrow and 10 years from now all look the same.
Post-traumatic disorders: I can’t leave from that place where I was hurt. By never leaving, I never move on.
Dependent disorders: The value of our bond depends on its ability to last forever, unchanged.
If I can’t move, I can’t stay. If I can’t stay, I can’t move. And in fact, whether they look similar or not, all these forms of suffering have that same fixation, that same purposelessness, that same overandoverness.
Back to our train, the perfect metaphor for integration: as something moves me, reliable and smooth, I can appreciate the folded and airy nature of presence. Here, while some of me knows and contemplates there. So we can free up space, and over and over becomes a flow. Movement that grounds. Presence that liberates.
Empatherapy 