Paraphrasing an old Georgian saying, one could say that the time spent on a train does not count toward one’s life. Trains give us the vital space between events. A few days of silence in which all social obligations fall away and you become nothing but an observer. Life rushes past outside the window as a single, continuous stream. Stepping outside your daily mechanical routine, you regain the ability to feel yourself as part of that flow again — to feel alive, simply and fully.

In Japanese culture, this phenomenon is called Ma (間) — a time and a place for pause in every sense, an emptiness not as the absence of something, but as the space in which something can arise. Without the pauses between notes, we would never hear music.