I've started taking the 6 train at 7AM instead of 8, and let me tell you, it's a different city an hour earlier.
The 6 train at 7AM is soft. Nobody is fighting for a pole. A man in scrubs sleeps with his mouth open near 77th. A kid does homework balanced on his knee. The fluorescent light is the same but somehow gentler.
At 68th Street–Hunter College, there's a woman I've now seen four days in a row. She stands just outside the turnstile with a plastic bag of seeds and she feeds the pigeons before she goes wherever she goes. Silver braid down her back. Cardigan even in August.
The 6 train at 7AM has taught me that some people build tiny cathedrals out of routine. She's not performing it. She's not filming it for anyone. She just does it, then dusts her hands and walks up the stairs into the heat.
It reminded me of my Nani in Ahmedabad, who used to leave a fistful of rotli out on the compound wall for the crows every morning before chai. She said the crows carried messages to people who'd passed. I never asked who she was writing to.
I got off at Grand Central like always, walked through the whispering gallery arches where two people were testing if the ceiling really carries a whisper corner to corner. It does. I know because I've done it, embarrassingly, alone.
The 6 train at 7AM gives you back the twenty minutes the 8AM train takes from your soul. I'm keeping this. Even if it means going to bed like a colonial-era grandmother.
Feed something small tomorrow. It counts.
Love,