SPOILER WARNING: If you’ve not watched Train Dreams on Netflix, then be careful! I talk about it in this article and go into some plot points. Also, go watch it if you haven’t, it’s really good.
Buoyed by bellies of full english breakfast, my friends and I pottered around town the other day. We talked to a guy behind the counter of a gift shop called Fat Giraffe, which sold things carved from wood: ducks, Spiderman ducks, pigs, little pirates, giraffes (naturally) and a £6,800 horse. He explained how he’d actually sold two of those horses. And how his store manager’s testicles have never been the same since Bigfoot’s wooden hands compressed them during a ‘difficult’ delivery process. No, none of this is particularly relevant to the messaging of this piece, besides me shoehorning it in here for the sake of a laugh.
Anyway, we popped into a homeware store called Heals after the Giraffe Man’s testicular tale. And little did I know how apt “Heals” would be, had I known the crisis-averting calm a small pedal bin would bring me that afternoon.
I’m reading Shoedog by Nike co-founder Phil Knight, which is an honest memoir of how Nike came to be and a very well written one at that. It’s a year-by-year pursuit of a dream to make his passion for running a full-time job without going down the athlete route. Not in the sense of some cliché, “Chase your dreams and you can achieve anything!!”, nonsense. More in the sense of being somewhat of a dodgy manager, taking risks, honouring mistakes, and making time for those good people in your life; treat them right, as they do you. It’ll pay back in kind.
While Shoedog is a wonderful read so far, it’s also pushed me into a vague existential crisis as befits anyone in their early 30s. Reading about a gifted young man bound across the world as he happens upon love and achieves hardfought success? While I’m sitting there in my flat, acutely aware I’m reading his words about love and success, alone and wondering what direction I want to take my life? Yeah, it hit me a bit. No, I didn’t go sob in a bath (baths are reserved for episodes of Indieventure only) but I suppose I felt pangs of regret. “Maybe I should’ve put myself out there more when I lived in Brighton” or “I spent so much of my time playing Overwatch until 3am when I lived in London during my Masters degree, could I have made more of an effort to like, socialise?”.
Then I remembered a film I’d watched not long ago.
Train Dreams directed by Clint Bentley (based on 2011 novella by Denis Johnson) is a tale about Robert Grainier, a railroader set in the early 20th century. A diligent, quiet man, he’s often away from his wife and daughter as seasonal logging contracts beckon. The work is dangerous and he meets many men who leave impressions on him, particularly one wise man who he grows close to. Throughout it all, Grainier contends with the attrition of his soul as he contributes to an industry that both puts a roof over his head and fells enormous patches of history as it expands. Let’s just say that he doesn’t have the, uh, easiest time of it.
Grainier’s life couldn’t be further from Phil Knight’s. Of course, you could argue they are incomparable for all sorts of reasons – I get it. But I think the sentiment still stands! Particularly as Train Dreams concludes in a rather beautiful way. An older, weathered Grainier takes a plane ride on a fine spring day. And as he whirls in the air and the summation of his life flicks before him, it all clicks into place. He finally smiles, a big beaming smile that we haven’t seen since the happiest days of his earlier years. Only a little later, we learn that Grainier passed away in his sleep alone, leaving no heirs. But on that spring day, “as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at least, connected to it all”.
So, as my friends and I walked through Heals and perused its ludicrously-priced handcreams called “By The Sea” and towels made of luscious fibres, I spotted a matcha green pedal bin. Normally when you depress the pedal of a standard pedal bin, you’re met by resistance that begets a forceful press, which then causes the lid to rocket upwards with such acceleration it threatens to launch the actual bin itself into the air. But no, not the Zone Denmark Nova One 3L Bin.
As I depressed the Nova’s pedal I let out a quiet “Oh my god” as I then frantically tugged at my pals’ sleeves and urged them to give their soles a quick toot. Their eyes widened in surprise, too, as they experienced the smooth up and then soooofffftttt close. Honestly dear reader, I likened the Nova’s tactility to that of a car’s clutch pedal. The sort of control you could experience from that bin’s lid lift? I could do a fucking hill start on that thing.
And then it hit me that our not-so-subtle response to the pedal bin was proper 30-year-old behaviour. People in their teens or twenties or whatever would be like, “That’s giving 30s” while hitting The Griddy (I don’t have TikTok anymore and I don’t know if people hit it anymore, smdh). I mean, we were unironically wandering around a homeware store and delighting in its wares, so fair enough. But it also confronted the existential crisis I’d had with some realism, before it took an axe to it Grainier-style and lobbed it into the Nova.
What the delicate decompress of the Nova’s pedal taught me in that moment was this: I don’t need to be Phil Knight or compare my progress to anyone elses. I don’t need to look back at my 20s and rue things I might’ve done now I’m older and have the benefit of hindsight (Brighton and London really helped shape me, in many ways). I don’t exactly need to know what direction I’m moving in, even. I’m just going to process the difficult things and delight in the small (so much joy can be found in the mundane, I think).
I want this year to be one where I’m less concerned with chasing partnership or resisting instability and focus on enriching my life with what matters to me. No, I might not be travelling every which way or going on exciting dates or building an empire. But I am absorbing beautiful novels and playing wonderful games and delighting in pedal bins.
Here’s to all of us moving through life at our own pace. Cheers.
Comments:
That was beautiful, Ed, thanks!
Glad you enjoyed!