Cologne! That place with the tasty beer and the pretty cathedral and where people speak their own version of German. It's my second office. Once or twice a week, I can shake up my commute and get off in the Big City. I can ride a tram along the river into the city's industrial southeast, where I sit in a quiet office and tap away at marketing words.
The commuter's curse is developing a tunnel vision, if they're not sleepwalking to work. They get so used to their ride to and from work, and are so wrapped up in getting to where they're going that they develop blinders that block out the things that make a commute bearable.
I'm a big believer in appreciating the little things – like trains with a bar that serves frosty pints of beer (even if they don't call them pints here) – and the big things we take for granted so easily that they become little things in our minds. Like the Dom:
There's not a day where I step out of the Köln's main station and I look up and think "Holy shit! I'm walking past this architectual wonder again." Of course, as I slow down a gawk, an irritable commuter bumps into me and mumbles, "Sheiße!"
It's as if Toronto's CN Tower was a few hundred years old and, like many us of who live or have lived in Toronto, owalk past it as we go about our business – sprinting to work, checking our phones, or rushing to a ball game – without appreciating that you're walking beneath something incredible.
Many of us can't choose how we commute to work. Some of us stress-drive there and back or zone out on the train or the bus. Our commutes can easily become dead time. I choose to turn that dead time into alive time, enjoying what I can. I dread the day I become the irritable commuter who shoulders his way past some Dom gawker.
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