Pre-COVID I used to regularly travel for work. Sometimes I flew, but often I took Amtrak. I loved Amtrak. I would sit in the quiet car, work while moving and simultaneously see the towns pass by my window one by one. I loved the personality of each town and city, thinking about the people who lived there and the unique and sometimes shared history of each of them.
I always chose the quiet car so I could work. I found it invasive to hear other people talking to each other and on their cell phones in other cars. When I had enough points I had the rare enjoyment of sitting in the First Class car, also quiet but with snacks!
One day on a ride North I was working on completing some required training and connected my earbuds to my iPad. I began the training and several minutes in became annoyed that someone in the quiet car was playing news or something out loud from their device. I couldn’t quite make out the content, and it wasn’t interrupting my progress so I tried to ignore it.
But soon my entitled presence was ruffled, as I thought ”There are rules in the quiet car” and they apply to all passengers. Which audacious offender is so flagrantly ignoring the quiet car protocol? I had to stop my training and identify the “___” (insert expletive).
Before long, I literally laughed out loud. I realized there was a setting on my (new) iPad that allowed both earbud access, and regular audio to concomitantly broadcast content. The violator I’d been secretly growing distain for, was me!
I chuckled as I fixed the audio setting to “earbuds only.” Then I pressed pause altogether to digest the powerful nudge to regularly challenge my perceptions.
We can be very quick to judge others and create a narrative around our experience. Yet so often we are completely off base with our assumptions. How much of life do we miss/waste by concluding some disruption (in this case noise in the quiet car) of our expectations is rooted in someone else’s behavior?
I am now making a practice taking off the proverbial earbuds sooner to do a reality check. The 10 or so minutes I spent thinking another rider had the gall to violate the norm, could have been spent on advancement of the task at hand.
I appreciate the generosity of my fellow riders, who let that continue a full ten minutes without reminding ME that I was in the quiet car. And I also remind myself that keeping a sense of humor is the best way to react when I realize, “it’s not them, it’s me.”