Routine Trips and Commutes

Curiosity about the extraordinary behind the ordinary moves the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil.  -Phil Cousineau

Today I'm dedicating this space to small trips. Routine trips.  Your daily commute to work, your drive to the local grocery store, the route you take between home and school. 


Whether we walk, ride a bike, drive, or take public transportation to get around, these small journeys take up a lot of room in our daily lives.  A study done by the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey* reported in 2005 that on average, Americans now spend more time commuting to work annually than they get in vacation time:  100 hours/year commuting vs. 80 hours/year vacationing.  


This seems really high, I know.  Believe it or not, the percentage of people in the US who commute more than ninety minutes round trip to their jobs is actually lower (at 11 percent) than in many other countries around the world:  workers in Japan, China, India and Korea have the highest percentages (32, 31, 26 and 25 percent, respectively)**.


Depressing, right?  We travel the same routes, day in and day out.  We put our minds on auto-pilot.  We distract ourselves during these small trips and longer commutes with music, smart phones, dvd players, books on tape, crossword puzzles, the newspaper, work we brought home from the office - whatever we can find to escape the drudgery of another soul-sucking ride to and from the places we have to be every day.


When I moved from rural, downstate Illinois to Chicago in the early 1990's, every day was a new adventure in getting to work.  I tried different bus routes, took the El train to stops that were varying distances away from my office, and walked home a different way each afternoon.  Perhaps it was because living in a city and riding buses and El trains was so new to me, or because I'm so nosey and curious about my surroundings, but I never got in the habit practiced by many of my fellow commuters - that of sticking my nose in a newspaper or book and ignoring what was happening around me till my stop was called.  If I had a spot near a window, I looked out the window.  If the train or bus was too crowded for me to be able to see out the windows, I looked around surreptitiously at my fellow passengers, noticing small details about them.


There were plenty of times in the twelve years I lived in Chicago, especially through the long, dreary winter days so endemic to the Midwest, that commuting via the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) lost its luster.  In order to fend off the funk that would settle over me during those times, and in order to break the monotony of the same old daily routine, I made up games to play in my head.  My favorite game was to look for the cutest guy or the most interesting-looking man within sight and fall in love with him, just for the duration of the ride.  (Did I mention what a total romantic I was as a youth?)  Ah, the coy flirtations that took place, the torrid and dramatic love affairs I carried on, the tragic, emotionally draining partings...all in my head, all between the Rockwell and Chicago Avenue stops, or Sedgwick and the Merchandise Mart, or 87th Street and Division Street.


Another thing I did was not so much a game as an exercise in awareness.  I made it my practice to try to notice one new thing on my commute every day.  It didn't have to be monumental.  It might be that the lady down the street had planted pink geraniums next to her front stoop.  Or the new burrito place opening up where the sub shop used to be.  Or - my favorite, one that I still look for when I'm on the Red Line - the parking lot behind that one building in River North, where there was always at least one random pair of shoes dangling over the low-hanging power line.


When I began making a conscious effort to really see the things that were around me, traveling to and from work and making those small daily trips to the same old places went from an annoyance to be endured to a rather delightful way to spend my time.  It was a daily mini-adventure I embarked upon to keep things lively while I waited to use my 80 hours of vacation time.


Okay, so noticing a couple pairs of shoes hanging over a parking lot isn't quite on par with lying on a beach in the South Pacific while some muscle-bound man in a sarong rubs warm oil into my skin (like I did that one day, with that hot guy on the Brown Line...in my head).  But it still gives me a small private thrill to think that I might be the only person in the El car on any given day to notice the bedraggled pair of running shoes that have landed next to the faded Chuck Taylors. 


What do you do to make your everyday small trips more interesting?  Did you notice anything new on your commute today?  Tell me about it!


Sources:
* 'Americans Now Spend Over 100 Hours A Year Commuting' by Robert Longley.  about.com, April 2005.
** '1 in 4 Koreans Spend 90 Minutes Commuting' by Bae Ji-sook.  KoreaTimes.com, 11Aug2010.