Be_flummoxed

He knew the place I came from and something of where I was going.

It seems to me that trains serve two primary purposes. They provide the imagery in many of our dreams. (I sometimes wonder what people used to dream about before there were trains.) And they can be a laboratory for encounters with strangers, another dreamland in plain sight. So it was with the stout older man beside me on the platform as we grumbled in unison about why passengers were routinely forced to wait on the platform in the cold, standing beside a train with its doors locked, when they could perfectly be let on and stay warm. Particularly during a cold snap like this one.

We got talking, so when we were finally allowed on board, we found ourselves at a table together. There seemed a lot to say. He had retired to southern Spain, while I have been living near the Pyrenees. What were we both doing in this freezing northland? Our train was southbound and that vector would continue for us both. He had owned textile factories and went into elaborate detail on the processing of hemp to make it behave like cotton: ‘it is so much more resilient to climate change and requires less water’; you can grow the stuff anywhere, he says. Moreover, he knew Russia in the 1990s, the post-perestroika period of unbridled, sink-or-swim deal-making, had opened a factory in Nizhny Novgorod and enthusiastically showed me ageing photos of him and his colleagues cavorting in a banya, forty years ago.

All this time, the train seemed to be moving fast, barely stopping, though there were a couple of stations. The scenery flashed past the windows; neither of us were looking at it, but I was aware of it and noted it loosely from time to time. Fields, woods, northern towns with rows of terraced houses. We were now in a different dream, that of our encounter, and the world flashed past as an afterthought: the gap of our meeting was the still point and the rest turned about it. He wove his story: he had booked tickets for his wife and himself on another train, to Kings Cross, but this had been cancelled at the last minute; thereupon his wife took the car south with their luggage while he volunteered to find his way to London by whatever trains would take him. And so he met me.

When I told him where I had come from that day, he goggled in amazement. A small town in Scotland that few outsiders really knew. ‘But I had a factory there!’ And he asked me whether I recognised such-and-such a company in the town. He had built up the business, and even obtained government aid to build a new, purpose-built premises. Not much later, however, he moved the operation to China; it was the time when everybody was doing this, as the production costs were half of those in the UK. ‘So I tend not to go back’, he explained, ‘they probably wouldn’t welcome me any more.’ And later, I told him my destination – a stop on the route to London – and he again recalled an industrial collaboration, some process engineering project realised in cooperation with the University of Leicester. But Leicester was also now mere memory to him, retreated from daily experience to one of the layers of the dream world. He had never before been on this particular railway line – and yet he knew both where I was coming from and where I was going.

When we arrived at Sheffield, we both wanted the next mainline train to London (in this particular dream, both east and west coast mainlines were disrupted and only this midland route was in operation). His original ticket having been first class and for two people, he invited me to join him in first class in place of his wife. Gleefully availing ourselves of two prime seats, with me as his temporary new ‘wife’, we sat back and were regaled with refreshments for the next hour.

He quizzed me about my life and my business. Translation, I told him, now replaced by artificial intelligence. The noble pursuit of cheapness, the dogmatic exclusion of added value. He nodded sympathetically. ‘If only I’d known you fifteen years ago’, he said, as a Russian-speaking communicator would have been a great help to him. But Russia is not a viable destination today, and he is long out to grass. ‘I would have had contacts. I could have found you a job.’ Meanwhile, he was curious that I have been studying and volunteering at a retreat centre. What’s that about, he asked? Sell it to me, he insisted. Yet this not being something that can be formulated or ‘sold’ as an idea, it was not easy for me to talk about; it does not respond well to direct challenges of this kind. Rather, he might find out through the qualities and manner of its students, and not through formulated statements. Still, I did my best. It is about coming to know oneself, inwardly, as one truly is; about realising that I am not truly the thing I think I am. It is about seeing our place in the grand scheme of life, in a contemplative rather than discursive manner. To him I must have come over as a bit of a loser – no real career, no earnings, and somewhat timidly hiding away at this Scottish retreat centre. Whereas he had got into business from the earliest time, starting from a market stall, and had become a buyer and seller of industrial enterprises.

Yet something had come over our meeting as it progressed (it was now into its third hour). Outside, darkness had settled over the Derbyshire fields and hedges and our train, a brand new, silent set, sliced the night past occasional lights and the blur of towns. And we too had ventured inward. Earlier, he had challenged my lack of self-esteem and my timid-looking life path, laughable to an orphan who had made good and probably made millions, who to boot had a large, loving, harmonious family. How different we were, for sure: his happiness is his family, whereas I was a wandering singleton. He demanded robust bullet points of reason for spiritual belief, whereas for me it is about mystery and direct experience. He spoke of his own religious tradition, into which he was born, but now in his seventies he found himself drawn to it more deeply. In our religion we have no homeland, he said – I sensed the pain of a wanderer behind his comfortable settled existence – and all that binds us together is fierce adhesion to tradition. But earlier he had said: ‘God is one, and that is true for us all’. ‘Look after yourself and you look after the world. What do you say? Is this wrong? Do you disapprove of me, with my worldly career and my dodgy deals?’

No, I said, anything but. I admired his pluck and his effort, and his successes. And it was clear to me how truthfulness and goodness appear in so many different life paths and personality types. The divine Being, if you like, appears in all these forms and manners, with all these life paths, each a revelation in itself. And this thrusting entrepreneur, with his curtailed childhood and, in turn, his absence toward his own children, spoke with as much truth, or more, than I could muster with my goody-goody tales of a retreat centre and inner light. Again he challenged me for what he perceived as lack of self-belief.

As we parted on the approach to Leicester, he thanked me for our time together. He had learnt something, I think, and had exercised his mind beyond the habitual. Something in my life, meek and unchallenging as it appears, had calmed him. He congratulated me meanwhile on finding satisfaction, albeit with simplicity and an element of poverty. I thanked him for being so generous with his life story and the effort he has poured into supporting himself and his family. We had travelled together in a shared dream, literally covering ground at speed. We had interwoven our life-stories, both told as dreams and received in a new dream. Each of us would extend and extrapolate that dream afterwards in our own way, but this much of it was common to us. I stepped down onto the cold platform and watched his train pull silently and smoothly away. Now the dream was inside the train and I was outside. He would soon be in London and with his family, then in a few days would return to Spain. The frosty days would pass; the east and the west coast lines would re-open. But we had both seen something and had been changed.