Losing your place
One of the things I’ve noticed travelling on the train is the number of people who lose their place momentarily. They might be reading, listening to music or just day-dreaming, when they suddenly realise that they don’t know exactly where they are because they haven’t been paying attention to the stops. They search the darkness outside anxiously for some familiar pattern in the lights and shadows.
It’s happened to me a couple of times, and it’s very disorienting. The odd thing is that you think that you know the line intimately, travelling on it every day. I think that the problem arises because the familiar landmarks are strongly bound up in their linear sequence; recognising where you are is rather dependent on knowing where you are in the sequence. Even in the daytime, if you lose your place along the sequence, it takes several moments to place what should be very familiar landmarks. Odd.
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That happens to me when taking the bus. I'll often sit there, listening to my iPod and reading a novel, oblivious to the world passing by outside of the windows. After awhile, when I sense that some large amount of time has passed (the commute is an hour long), I look up from my book and stare out the windows.
That's when I panic slightly.
After a moment or two I'll pick out a landmark, but even then I'm slightly worried--until I see the next landmark, and then the next. Once I've noticed a few landmarks in the right succession, I know that I'm not just in the right place but I'm also going the right direction.----- I'm glad I'm not the only one who has this problem.
I think the reason why I 'panic slightly' when I snap out my somnolence, is that I have actually day-dreamed my way past my stop before. D'oh : )
by Nick @ 17/11/2004 2:11 pm • Permalink •
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Nathan: Weird isn't it? You'd think our navigational abilities would be a bit more sophisticated than that.
Nick: Hehe
I've done it too, but I have the advantage of getting a second chance. I can either get off at one stop and walk home or get off two stops later and get a bus.
by bsag @ 17/11/2004 7:11 pm • Permalink •
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i've many many times thought a great invention would be station-beepers. pay a deposit, dial your station, it goes off half a mile before your station, you drop it in a collection slot. every drunken commuter's dream
by Saltation @ 18/11/2004 12:11 am • Permalink •
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I experience this sometimes at my dinner table (or some other everyday situation). Don´t we all? Sometimes trying to mantain a linear grip and orientation on and through the absurdity of life and reality can be quite panicky. I truly wish that we had a more sophisticated navigation system. (Jesus, Mohamed or Hitler are not, I believe, sophisticated systems or even near to being answers, so anybody who has any suggestion that is along those lines please keep it for your self)
by john @ 18/11/2004 10:11 am • Permalink •
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A metaphor for life. That suddenly searching for where we are has lead people to meditation, to "life retreats", to simply taking some time out, to lifting our heads from the task in our hands to look about to see where we are, how far have we gotten, where we are going.
My first time here-- what a wonderful site!
by Tony Iovino @ 19/11/2004 10:12 am • Permalink •
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These moments are indicative of more than one thing. There's the thing NIck points out - a moment of anxiety based on needing to know where one is. John recognises the feeling from the table, and I recognise the feeling from coming out of a deep sleep, and even a daydream. The variety of possibilities suggests that we are not creatures driven by spatial orientation: some of what we do is in complete and 'other-wordly' disregard of where we are.
For a moment, I thought this was about being in a chronosynclastic infundibulum, a different kind of space-time. But then it occurred to me that the need for external references is imposed by the practical situations we get ourselves into. So the question is turned on its head. What is it about practical life that interrupts our reverie? To top it off, I think it's worth asking what this space of reverie is about. Is it like peripheral vision? What's the physiological referent?
Perhaps Vonnegut has some answers.
by David @ 21/11/2004 2:12 am • Permalink •
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