For a long time, I’ve wondered about my fascination and experience of watching my model trains move around the wandering track in my basement. I sometimes even enter into that feeling just by imaging, remembering what it is like to watch them move.
I easily feel an openness and inviting allure that can arise even when I am only thinking about the experience of seeing the trains snake around corners or rumble down straight stretches of track . The puzzling part is that it is a felt experience not unlike what I encounter when I am entering into a state of focused, deep concentration on my meditation cushion.
Much of this is not new. For a long time I have considered this fascination with moving trains just part of my having Aspergers Syndrome, or AS. I’ve accepted that the orderliness and predictability of a train moving along a carefully defined path is an experience that someone with AS would find both comforting and attractive.
For me, my heightened interest in moving trains, seemed a normal trait of someone like me whose brain circuitry is slightly different from typical humans.
Now I am not so sure. I think that there is more to it. Because the train experience is so similar to focused concentration, I think it is more than just a symptom for someone with an uncommon brain circuitry.
Now, I am less apt to dismiss it simply as a characteristic AS symptom, and I am more prepared to see it as a helpful, reinforcing pathway to insight.
I am noticing that, for me, moving trains have been a learning experience. Moving trains allow me to feel what it is like both to enter into focused concentration and at the same time have a close encounter with impermanence.
A moving train is different from a train the is standing still on a fixed track. Watching a moving train has all the felt experience of encountering changing reality. It invites an abiding awareness of impermanence.
I might find a similar fascination with a spinning wheel or the whirling blades of a windmill. There is a sense of fixed reality coupled with an immediate experience of constant change or impermanence . But for me, it has been trains that have been most helpful.
A moving train going around a sinuous track is a facile way of experiencing impermanence while at the same time having an anchoring in a static reality. For me, it is a reflection of the changing world arising out of a solid foundation of infinite possibility.
Even a moving, constantly changing train simply “is”. A moving train offers both a focused concentration on “being”, while it is also in a state of constant change. It is a reflection of the impermanent world that simply “is” all around me. It is not unlike what I glimpse from time to time while sitting on my cushion.
Perhaps AS has given me an opening into the experience of something that otherwise might have been more difficult. Perhaps it helped moving trains give me a taste for what later would for me become part of deep concentration.
At any rate, I am grateful for moving trains. I think that my experience of trains has offered me a gateway to experience something much more than constantly turning wheels on fixed tracks.