Commuting Adventures

Commuting to and from working can get to be downright boring if you don’t do it correctly. How does one commute “correctly,” you might ask. Let me show you.

Before I arrived in DC, I starting memorizing a map of the city and all of the possible walking/bus/Metro combinations I could take to work. When I arrived in the city, this meant that I was daily presented with an almost limitless number of commuting options. So about a month into my internship I started a little game to try to find the fastest and most efficient route to work. I am such a capitalist. 

Every day the light would change at a different moment  or I would be behind people walking various speeds down the sidewalk. This forced me to make split second decisions: “Should I cross now or keep walking and make the next light?” Or, “based on the traffic this morning, should I continue on this street or take a left?”

The people I walked past probably wondered why I was smiling. Little did they know it was because I was cheering that yet again I was approaching an intersection right as the light was changing. Boo-ya!

The same thing worked in the Metro. Every day I made it a little game to guess where along the platform the train would stop and what door I would need to sit near to exit the train at the base of the elevator at my stop.

Commuting has so much potential to be boring—walking the same route every day, seeing the same people, passing the same stores—but  I experienced a small amount of pleasure (and dare I admit it, challenge) in daily changing up my routine. There are so many patterns to be enjoyed in life all around us, if only we will make the effort to keep them fresh.