Skip to content
0
0
Summer Pan ed. Kyren Lavan
I’m not a numbers-person. My world revolves around words, phrases, punctuation – em-dashes, even. You can probably guess that maths has never been my forte.
Yet a few weeks ago, I came across a quote about numbers, and I’m not sure if it was due to the autumn darkness before 6pm or the unfathomable embryology lecture I had watched this morning, but it really inspired me at the moment.
The quote was: “Count something… if you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.”
So I started counting.
In week 3, I decided to count the number of hours of public transport to and from UNSW. It’s all I ever complain about – and yet, I’m sure there are some of you who have it worse than me. I tend to focus better when attending in-person lectures, so my daily commute begins at 7:03 with a bus that takes me to the train station. The bus trundles down a few side streets, collecting passengers. Then, at 7:37, I travel to Central on an all-stops train – this, admittedly, does contribute to my commute being longer than it should be, but this train in particular always has spare seats, is surprisingly never late (unlike the express CCN), and stops at the station of my close friend. We arrive at 8:24am and walk from Platform 14 to Central Chalmers’ Street, weaving around people who are also suffering through their daily commute. I haven’t yet tried counting how many of them there are.
From Central Chalmers’ Street, it’s usually too crowded with rowdy high-schoolers and weary office workers with their cups of coffee to board the first or second light rail that pulls up to the stone platform, so by the time I get onto the third one and arrive at High Street or Anzac Parade, it’s almost 9am. Now, just multiply that commute by two for the time spent returning home and you’d get my daily travel time.
On Monday, I travelled for 3 hours and 21 minutes. Here’s a photo of the pink clouds during a 5pm sunset after walking out of Wallace Wurth G06.
On Tuesday, all I had were lectures so I could watch them from home! My count of zero public transport minutes that day really made me appreciate the comfort of my chair. And my room. And the accessibility of my fridge.
On Wednesday, my dad dropped me off at the station and I witnessed a wonderful, wonderful rainbow while running to catch my train (see the banner above!). However, when I came home at 5:36 after a QMP tutorial, the skies were grey and it started pouring and all I could think about was, ‘wow, this is some crazy pathetic fallacy’. 2 hours and 49 minutes.
On Thursday, I arrived by 9am and left at 6:45pm after participating in the Women’s Case Competition; my total travel time was shorter than Monday’s at about 3 hours, as I was thankfully picked up by my parents in the ‘dark and stormy night’. Despite feeling exhausted by the long day at UNSW, I made the most of my trip home by drawing a blastocyst on Day 11 of gestation. I’m no artist, but I’m very proud of it. Perhaps I should switch over to the arts’ team.
On Friday, I had a 3-5pm anatomy lab session. My friend and I watched the golden hour sunlight beam off of Wallace Wurth and illuminate the autumn leaves as we walked towards the light rail. As I was returning home on the train, counting up my final hour of public transport for the week, we crossed the Parramatta River and I glanced away from my phone. The last few rays of the day reflected off the waves and a boat churned along, unable to keep up with the express CCN train. It reminded me how grateful I was to be able to appreciate these sights. It reminded me that life was so much bigger than my world of words.
That day, I commuted for 3 hours and 24 minutes, as my bus was later delayed – a round-trip that took longer than my anatomy practical. Over the entire week, I spent 12 hours and 34 minutes on public transport. That’s crazy. Oh dear.
However, if not for my commute, I wouldn’t have seen the rainbow, or drawn a blastocyst, nor crossed the Parramatta River – in fact, I reckon that I’ve looked out over this waterway more times in the past three months than I have in my eighteen-and-a-half years of existence. And now I know the difference between the extraembryonic somatic mesoderm and the extraembryonic splanchnic mesoderm! All the complaints about the time I spend on public transport wither away. The commute is one way, at least, for me to gather my thoughts, listen to the mundane chatter of my fellow passengers, and watch the sunset.
If you were wondering, the quote came from the book ‘Better’ by Atul Gawande. I’d recommend it. It stares down from my bookshelf whenever I sit down to study and it tells me to ‘be better’ whenever I start to procrastinate, and I tell it to shut up and then I wonder if I’m already going crazy in the first year of this medical degree.
I’m not a numbers-person. I probably never will be one. But if counting helps me appreciate life just a little bit more, I’m all for it.
Average Rating