Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.

Søren Kierkegaard

There are quite few things that are making this experience so interesting. The train is full of amazing people. The windows provide much more than just a view outside. The countryside is generous enough to let us watch her and slutty enough to let anyone’s gazes dive deep inside of her. Yet the most impressive thing on this train is something not visible, nor something to taste or talk to. The most amazing thing in this train is time.

So far I’ve discovered three flavors of time, each of them with a different meaning and feeling.

Time 1: The Moscow time

Also known as the Uberzeit of all Zeits. The one which defines all the arrivals and departures of the train. The train stops here and there, every few hundreds kilometers in a city and it’s passengers can use these few minutes of “free time” to take a walk on the platform and buy some ratios from the babushkas sitting on old chairs with their toothless smiles and their brilliant product portfolio, which among other things, include delicacies such as frozen fish, frozen bread, frozen sausages, and boiled eggs. I’m sure that after a minute or two of searching you would find a bottle of frozen vodka as well.

No matter what the local time is, everything train-related works on the Moscow time. We’ve left Omsk just few minutes ago. It’s 17:05, yet the train officially departed on 14:00. No matter how light or dark it is outside, my wrist watch is always set on Moscow time. I hope not to lose my wrist watch.

Time 2: The regional time

A slightly more fickle time. With my time of waking up being mostly fixed, the days are getting shorter and shorter. Maybe it’s only my desire to attribute some magicality to his whole experience, yet it seems that the quality of evening light seems to change as well. The satin curtains in the dining car are receiving a calming, orange-ish feeling, and even the ultra-light Baltika beer feels somehow richer during the cosy golden hours that arrive only few minutes after noon.

Time 3: The inner time

This is the one by which I was used to divide the day. It had maybe 5-6 parts:

• Morning (that’s when you wake up during weekdays and when you still sleep during weekends)
• Brunchytime (that’s when you have typically already arrived to work and actually did some work because it’s too soon to procrastinate and lunch is still far far away. During weekends, you just start waking up)
• Lunch (that part of the day when your brain brings up crazy excuses to allow you to treat yourself or actually punish yourself for something in 99% of cases totally irrelevant to food. Some people get cranky because of this)
• Afternoon (you work again, yet slower this time, because it’s getting slowly darker outside and your stomach is still heavy from the lunch)
• Evening (you come back from work and you try to do things that kind of sound meaningful but are often just pure waste of time that only glues together the afternoon time with the sleeping time)
• Night (you either sleep or you do stuff that you usually think is fun at that time. In the morning, you usually feel embarrassed)

The funny thing – this division somehow doesn’t work in this space. For some reason I can’t even describe it. It’s different from the typical holiday sluggishness. The flow of time within myself, my own perception of time feels as if the axis by which it moves is turned by 90 degrees from what I was using until now.

Let us take today as an example. I wake up and I watch the birch trees moving behind the window. The fields covered in thick snow are running like crazy from right to left. Sometimes they are leading my eyes for a moment, thus showing their exact shapes and details. Sometimes they are turning into a messy blur and all I can distinguish are the shades of white and brown. The constant movement creates an illusion of a drastic change, yet the actual change is very limited. I read a book. I talk with the girls. I watch the trees. I drink a beer. I’m not defined by mornings, noons, or evenings, because everything is… a simple and beautiful mess.

I often see the “normal” time as a wonderfully crafted Nomos Glashütte Tangente – a meticulously designed, ticking, precise set of points. This third time lies on the exact opposite side of the spectrum – it feels more like a hefty portion of mud. Freshly scooped from the old, smelly pond, put on a lovely white plate, slowly oozing into the sides, losing its original shape. One slowly flowing substance. There is no price set of points, no seconds, no dials, no movements. If these exact limitations are removed, the specific time, the specific hour, the moment, all these things lose their original meaning. A point in time becomes a flow, making the original concepts of past and future futile, enormously helping to focus on the present. This detachment from daily conventions I was used to brings a fresh breeze of freedom and independence.

Suddenly, many mundane things feel much more enjoyable. Having a brunch with the girls in my compartment at 13:00. Walking on a train platform during the evening. Silently watching other people riding the train. Feeling how the Siberian frost freezes up the hair in my nose. Reading a book.

Yes, even reading a book feels different.

Just before my journey, I spent few hours in the bookstore searching for *the* book to be my only companion from the start to the end of my journey. Just as perhaps with anything in the life, I quickly found out that there is no *the* book as every single one makes the journey only taste different, not necessarily better. In the end I decided to take Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Without so many time points around, I’m now able to dive deeper into the story, compare the values, morals, standards, feelings with my own.

Maybe it’s because I’m alone.

And maybe it’s just because, after a long long time, I decided not to feel busy and have deliberately put myself into a space, where time doesn’t feel like a set of points, but rather a chunk of mud.