Walden on Wheels: What the Rails Taught Me About Slowing Down

I talk a lot about being intentional. About deliberate practice, deliberate design, deliberate teaching. And then, when life got in the way, and I forgot to rebook my travel to/from the Adobe Education Summit and accidentally had the most unintentionally intentional six days of travel that I'd never dreamed of.

A summer that included traveling to and running debate judges at NSDA Nationals in Richmond, then one week later traveling to Orlando to present multiple sessions at ISTE and then a two-week break before traveling to San Jose for the Adobe Education Summit. Ending my summer with travel that included five trains and two connecting buses, accumulating more miles than I can calculate, provided exactly what I needed. Time to roll through the great American West at a pace vastly different from a speech and debate tournament or the adrenaline of the conferences and summits are full of. It allowed me to feel like the world had finally exhaled.

While flying to/from San Jose may have given me more time to do things before/after the summit and had been more "convenient," what I discovered is that I did not need convenience; I needed time that belonged entirely to me.

Teaching does this to you.

This lyric used to be my attitude and my mantra. A badge of honor worn by someone who believed that pushing through was the only option worth considering.

Not just teaching; plenty of professions do. The doctor who cannot remember the last time they ate a meal without checking their phone. The lawyer billing hours so relentlessly that vacation feels like a liability. The nurse whose shift ends but whose nervous system does not. We have built entire professional cultures around the idea that busyness is a virtue and rest is something you earn rather than something you need.

Teachers feel this in a specific and particular way. The school year runs on urgency: the bell schedule, the pacing guide, the parent email that arrived at 11 pm, the lesson that needs to be better by tomorrow morning. And then summer arrives, and instead of rest, it often brings professional development, curriculum planning, conference travel, and the quiet pressure to emerge in August as a somehow more optimized version of the person who stumbled out of the building in May.

I love this work. I love it enough to spend a summer presenting at conferences, attending webinars, continuing my own education, and rebuilding my entire classroom practice from scratch for Year Zero. But love does not make you immune to depletion. And somewhere in the accumulation of all of it, the version of me that knows how to be still, that knows how to look out a window and just see what is there, had gotten very quiet.

The train gave him back to me.

Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond in 1845 with a purpose. He wanted to live deliberately, to strip away the noise of a world moving too fast and find out what remained when the distraction stopped. He built a cabin. He stayed for two years. He wrote about what he found there and called it one of the most important experiments of his life.

I did not build a cabin. I bought a train ticket. But somewhere between San Jose and home, rolling past mountains and desert and the particular golden light of the American West at sixty miles an hour, I understood something about what Thoreau was after. I understood his pursuit to live deliberately.

The Surrender

Here is what a train does that a car and a plane cannot.

It strips you of any sense of control.

When you drive, you control the speed. You control the route. You control the stops. You can push harder when you are behind, slow down when you are tired, adjust the journey to your will. When you fly, the urgency is different but equally relentless: you are moving at maximum speed toward a fixed destination, compressed into a seat, suspended above the world at an altitude where you cannot see anything that actually matters about the landscape below.

A train gives you neither of those options. The rails go where they go. The schedule is what the schedule is. If the weather changes or the freight train ahead needs to clear a junction, you wait. You do not negotiate with the train. You surrender to it.

And surrender, it turns out, is exactly what I needed.

I spent more time looking out the window on these multiple trains than I have spent looking at anything in months. Not because I had nothing else to do: I had a laptop, a notebook, a Polaroid camera that I was too scared to use more than six times, and enough downloaded content to last a week. I looked out the window because the window kept offering me something I had not realized I was hungry for: the world, moving past at a speed slow enough to actually see it.

Mountains. Desert. Rivers. Towns. The specific texture of the American West in July, rendered at human scale rather than from thirty thousand feet above it. I took pictures. I thought thoughts that had nowhere urgent to be. I talked to my family and told them that this...this particular quality of presence, this enforced slowness...was something I had not felt in a long time.

Thoreau Without the Quiet Desperation

Thoreau famously wrote that most people lead lives of quiet desperation. I am not entirely on that bandwagon (although at times my variety of mental health issues and neurodivergence may beg to differ!).

But I do think he was onto something about speed. We are asked to live, act, and think too quickly. The pace of modern life carries a relentless forward momentum of a life that is always preparing for the next thing, a momentum that accumulates in ways that a single good night's sleep cannot fully address. The adrenaline is real, and it is its own kind of fuel. But fuel burns. And eventually the tank needs something more than another quick fill.

The train did not give me silence. It gave me something better: permission to be unproductive in the most productive possible way. To empty my mind without guilt, because there was genuinely nothing else I could be doing. To let thoughts arrive in their own time rather than scheduling them. To be present not because I was trying to practice presence but because the train made presence the only available option.

With less than 14 hours in my journey, I can tell you that I am bouncing back focused. Not because I pushed through. Not because I couldn't hang and found the door. Because I stopped.

The Right Time, The Right Place

There could have been a version of this post where I planned the train ride as a deliberate reset, a thoughtful, intentional choice to honor the end of a big summer with a slower return home.

That is not what happened. What happened is kismet. Life causing travel-altering plans, the graciousness of a community, a last-minute search for alternatives, and a decision that seemed merely practical in the moment... it is cheaper, it gets me home, it will be fine...turned into something I am still thinking about days later.

The summer was full. ISTE was exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. The Adobe Education Summit was three days of community and creativity and things I cannot talk about yet but am genuinely excited about. By the time I boarded the train in San Jose, I had been running on conference energy for the better part of a month, and I did not fully know how empty my tank was until the train gave me a reason to stop and check.

The rails found me at the right moment. The constraint that felt like an inconvenience turned out to be a gift. And the two days of enforced slowness, of mountains through windows and thoughts with nowhere to be, sent me home more ready for August than any amount of deliberate planning could have produced.

Why I Am Taking the Train to TCEA

In February, TCEA happens in San Antonio.

I am taking the train.

Not because it is the fastest option. Not because it is the most convenient. Because I now know something I did not know before this summer: the journey matters, and not just as a metaphor. The hours on the rails are not dead time to be optimized away. They are thinking time, breathing time, the particular kind of reset that only happens when you surrender control and let the world move past you at a speed slow enough to actually see it.

Thoreau went back to Walden because he had found something there worth returning to. I understand that now in a way I did not before.

The rails will be there in February. I will be on them.