Jane Austen's work being my only true frame of reference on this, I must first apologize for the outstanding amount of ignorance I'm about to engage in
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Public transportation for me is often the most stressful part of my day. I either want to sleep or read quietly, and yet screaming children, loud conversations, or smelly drunks inflict themselves on me willy-nilly. Blech.
The Sound Transit isn't so bad, since it's usually business commuters, but the city bus can be pretty awful.
I seem to deal with one of the more insane stops in the city route ... I take the 14 and the 7, and either way, one of my stops is 5th and Jackson. Waiting there is implicitly stressful, 1/3 of the people waiting there tends to be on my radar of Potentially Dangerous at Any Moment.
I often get a schizophrenic sitting next to me, or the children screaming, or the paranoid asshole yelling at the bus driver... there's a long list of evil that rides the city public transit. But there are times when people keep to themselves and I am able to relax and get into my own head.
Perhaps someday if there were single-person cars that did all the driving for us, there might be a real analogy. I'm stretching.
I'm trying to draw a conclusion about stress reduction and long journeys when one is not in charge of the transportation mechanism. Am I full of it?
Pretty much ... ;)
Seriously, the whole focus on "relax, enjoy the journey" is a construct of the 20th century; prior to that, the XIX century was focused on progress, science, striving ere to seek, to know. It was pretty much the opposite of the 20th century - people had standards that they were expected to meet, leisure was a sign of laziness, etc.
What I've read of Hugo, Tolstoy and Austen seems to lend a strong sense of leisure to me - visiting the manor in the country, time spent in the parlor... and perhaps this is what the women did more than the men, but it seems to me that the men spent an awful lot of time riding around the country to various manors, shooting stuff, and uhm, leisure stuff.
Do I just have terribly bad examples, or examples only of a certain social caste? I hate being this ignorant, it's infuriating.
It's not ignorance so much as a lack of context ... we live in a deconstructionist age, or a "post-modern" age, so we tend to focus on "what the text brings to us" rather than the inheritance of a text - that is, what the author was thinking when he actually wrote the book
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Leisure was a sign of affluence and success, not lazyness. If you were successfull or had the right family you could engage in leisure. It was an ideal
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Is relinquishing control and letting the mind wander on the journey conducive to reducing stress?
I wholeheartedly think so. I believe that public transportation can reduce stress. However, one's outlook toward the public can greatly affect this. I am by nature not paranoid of the general public. (Although I am pretty paranoid of people I've met.) I feel comfortable walking around downtown in the middle of the night. If you are not comfortable doing that, you might be replacing stress and tension over driving and the imminent stress of your destination with stress over random strangers. Even when they are merely annoying and not threatening, I am pretty good at tuning them out.
Since I am not stressed by that, I find public transportation greatly reduces my stress and lets me get a chance to focus away from a pressure to do anything. I don't have to focus on traffic. I can think about my life, but I can't DO a hell of a lot about it. One of my big stressors is that I tend to jump to conclusions about my life and what I
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The Sound Transit isn't so bad, since it's usually business commuters, but the city bus can be pretty awful.
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I seem to deal with one of the more insane stops in the city route ... I take the 14 and the 7, and either way, one of my stops is 5th and Jackson. Waiting there is implicitly stressful, 1/3 of the people waiting there tends to be on my radar of Potentially Dangerous at Any Moment.
I often get a schizophrenic sitting next to me, or the children screaming, or the paranoid asshole yelling at the bus driver... there's a long list of evil that rides the city public transit. But there are times when people keep to themselves and I am able to relax and get into my own head.
Perhaps someday if there were single-person cars that did all the driving for us, there might be a real analogy. I'm stretching.
Reply
Pretty much ... ;)
Seriously, the whole focus on "relax, enjoy the journey" is a construct of the 20th century; prior to that, the XIX century was focused on progress, science, striving ere to seek, to know. It was pretty much the opposite of the 20th century - people had standards that they were expected to meet, leisure was a sign of laziness, etc.
Reply
What I've read of Hugo, Tolstoy and Austen seems to lend a strong sense of leisure to me - visiting the manor in the country, time spent in the parlor... and perhaps this is what the women did more than the men, but it seems to me that the men spent an awful lot of time riding around the country to various manors, shooting stuff, and uhm, leisure stuff.
Do I just have terribly bad examples, or examples only of a certain social caste? I hate being this ignorant, it's infuriating.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Is relinquishing control and letting the mind wander on the journey conducive to reducing stress?
I wholeheartedly think so. I believe that public transportation can reduce stress. However, one's outlook toward the public can greatly affect this. I am by nature not paranoid of the general public. (Although I am pretty paranoid of people I've met.) I feel comfortable walking around downtown in the middle of the night. If you are not comfortable doing that, you might be replacing stress and tension over driving and the imminent stress of your destination with stress over random strangers. Even when they are merely annoying and not threatening, I am pretty good at tuning them out.
Since I am not stressed by that, I find public transportation greatly reduces my stress and lets me get a chance to focus away from a pressure to do anything. I don't have to focus on traffic. I can think about my life, but I can't DO a hell of a lot about it. One of my big stressors is that I tend to jump to conclusions about my life and what I ( ... )
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