Training Underway
Like most New Yorkers, I climb down the half flight of stairs to the subway each morning. On a good day, I shuffle on my feet, waiting impatiently for the 4 minutes it takes for my train to arrive; but more often than not, I am panting with my hands on my knees after racing to the track. I have a penchant for the race – me vs the train – I count down the seconds each day, one hand in my pocket and the other frantically unlocking my phone. The stopwatch is set. The pistol is fired.
I feel younger than I am, I’m sure that’s not an uncommon feeling in most 20-something year olds. But when you’re 20-something, you’re surrounded by other 20-somethings feeding into that delusion. “Why do I need to figure out my job already?”, “My body is exceptionally tolerant to a block of my cheese,”, “ W2 forms and taxes are an April task”, “What’s the difference between a Roth IRA and a 401K?”, “How much protein should an average human adult consume?”, “The dryer setting shrinks all my clothes” and “When does an adult truly feel like an adult?” Maybe the distinct lack of answer to these questions is why we’re collectively struggling. Maybe these answers are too grand to fit into a Tiktok series. It’s easy to feel tiny and helpless and dippy compared to the seriousness that being an upstanding adult entails.
That is until I am looking down at a toddler. Maybe parents know this already, that being old is as much a relative feeling as it is an absolute indicator (to drink, to drive, to retire). But here I am, realising it at 8:30 am, when the little humans go to their daycares and preschools. And not for the first time, it dawns on me that even though I could maybe cosplay as a grumbling teenager in high school, I am no longer a kid. Because staring at me is a boy (somewhere between 2 and 7, I’ve lost the ability to tell) playing with two play-doh dinosaurs. He makes little snarks and roars as the dinosaurs bounce up and down, extensions of his own hand. He’s quiet and polite, his arms don’t smack the other passengers and his voice doesn’t raise high over the drone of the train. But even in this subdued state of play, he is immersed. It looks like fun.
I can’t remember the last time I had fun on a train.
But as I take a train later in the day, I see another instance of play. I see a man sitting down, staring at his Switch. My arms are raised to the ceiling as I grab hold of the railing desperate not to fling into someone around me. So I don’t get a good look at his screen. With the other hand though he swipes through spotify soundtracks, singing as the train jets forward. I’m sure some of you have encountered this before – grown men singing out loud in public places. The sight makes me rearrange my face into neutrality, lest they see me. It struck me that on these two trains, mere hours apart, two boys armed with toys elicited such different reactions from me. One I envied and the other I avoided. It made me yearn for a world where for a grown up to freely play, they didn’t need to be an outlier.
I was surprised that I saw the same boy every day for the rest of the week. Even when we’d get into different coaches, we’d get off at the same stop. He would duck below the turnstile while leaving the station and I'd chuckle, “Silly boy!”. One day, I heard him let out a cry before I saw him. Silly Boy had gotten stuck in the revolving turnstile, his limbs awkwardly sandwiched. His mum yelped and rushed out through the emergency exit to help him, but he had already slithered out by then. What was to follow was the universal gestures of a mom chastising her kid. But he didn’t mean any harm by it. He made an error in judgement, a miscalculation. Similarly, people are not conniving when they jump the same turnstiles, they just make a mistake. But as the clamouring NYPD officers imply, we don’t really let adults colour outside the lines.
If you’ve reached this far, you deserve to know that this is an essay of parts – a back and forth if you will. You deserve some vulnerability. I did not come to New York in pursuit of games. Yet, somewhere along the way, I have become a game maker. Embracing play is a key part to that. But you see, I am not a very good game maker. My games are not clever enough to be esoteric, nor fun enough to be mainstream. So, I write to you from the weird, undefined, subliminal space in between.
When I was a kid, I was as playful as I was serious. I'd dance and orchestrate plays but I’d also be wrapped up in a book for hours. In high school, I’d take breaks from arduous studying to play with my mother and we’d kick a chappal around the house, trying to land it in a tile. Now, I hold both parts when I make my games and the knowledge that they are equally vital. Equally fulfilling. I make games to process the climate crisis and apps that make learning fun. I know collective moments, even serious ones, can be fun (protest games, for example, which I once played on a picket line).
Still, it gnaws on me that all I do on a train is scroll, while away time, or make half assed attempts at reading. I wish I had more fun on the train. I wish I left the station without a headache, constantly sucked into the same currents of people rushing to wherever New Yorkers soaked in self importance rush to. I’ve tried every manner of noise cancelling device to make my transit more bearable.
Trains should be sanctuaries, a state of play for everyone. Those idle moments, free from connectivity, where we get to rest our sombre selves. There are already some games at play, musical chairs for example, they’re just not very fun right now. I usually zip into a train (still panting) and immediately scan for a seat. Usually I end up wedged between two people who’d rather I didn’t invade their personal space. Once, I was sitting across from a Great Dane (I was sitting, but she was sprawled). The Dane felt no shame or sense of urgency to relinquish one of her four seats in an incredibly busy G train. I’m not sure if I imagined a twinkle in her eye, but there was definitely mischief brewing. I still remember the little skip with which she dismounted her throne before heading out the door, RBF intact and looking incredibly smug. I think she was onto something. We must make these musical chair interactions more entertaining for ourselves. Healthy competition, chivalry, mischief.
It’s high time to embrace my transit.
I want to whisper secret challenges to my friends. We try to catch strangers' eyes on the train just to blow a raspberry at them. Soon the whole coach catches on and plays the game. I want bingos plastered on the wall– wore green socks today, forgot to pack an umbrella, ate a bagel – that people try to win just so that they can set the bingo for the next day. Instead of staring at the same 10 adverts daily, let's dust off our colouring books, draw silly faces and devil horns till each advert is a snowflake. Let’s make greenhouses, relinquishing our seats to fill the train with lush green. And once they overgrow, and spill onto the floors, let’s piece ourselves closer together to make space for the marvelous miracles we grew together. Let’s hold each other as we return home, tired and heavy, and watch movies of color and motion unfold on the walls of the tunnel that our garden traverses.
Let’s swing from the railings, share knowing smirks and inside jokes, embrace the peculiar, share our toys with generosity, leave with a spring in our step. I vote that we turn our commutes into communities – filled not with malice or dread but playfulness.
But in the meantime, hold on Silly Boy, our trains have got some catching up to do.