Your Life is a Train — Which Wagon Needs Improvement?

Sometimes we need to find a metaphor to relate our life with something better, easier to understand. Your Life as a Train works great for an analogy and can make us realize which wagon needs improvement to achieve personal development.

Welcome aboard! This is Giorgos, your driver for the day. We are about to start a journey to[insert your destination here]. It might be a destination for a successful career. Maybe the destination will be a complete family. It will be a ride, literally and figuratively, so sit tight people!

The problem is, as you are on a journey to your destination, that something is keeping you from building speed and momentum. You are standing still, not knowing what went wrong as you embark on the journey of life. You decide to hit the breaks and look for what’s broken.

As you stand outside of your train you notice it…A wagon is broken. It’s the Health Wagon. It seems that you gave more attention to your other wagons that you forgot about this one. Now you feel weak. But there is still room for change.

By creating an analogy about your life you can identify the problems more easily. I have chosen a train in this scenario.

Let’s head into relating the parts of a train with your life before searching for a solution.

Your train

It’s your life. The train resembles every part of you as a person. It’s what passengers(people around you) see before they decide to be a part of it.

Your Destination

Let’s assume that you are aiming for a full complete life. Having a great family, career, and health.

You want that train to look like the one in my story above. It’s about to take you on a slow ride around Europe, It’s beautiful and it looks like a 19th-century train. The floor will be made out of wood. It will go through forests and fancy bridges. A treat in the eye. It’s a heavy train, every passenger car is full of great memories and a lovely life.

It’s not about the destination. It’s more about the journey.

Let’s assume you are aiming for a successful career. You leave some parts of your life behind(passenger cars) in order to be faster and get to your destination. Or you empty some others in order to be lighter.

You want this train to look like one in the Shinkansen. The Shinkansen is a network of high-speed trains in Japan. No delays. It gets the job done. Fast and effective. It’s more about the destination.

The wheels

An important piece of a train. You want to keep a train moving. The railways are a straight line. You can’t just turn left or right with your journey.

But you also want the wheels to not be rusty.

Maintaining a routine in life keeps your train in motion. You can’t just slow down every now and then.

The journey kind of train needs to be moving constantly. Filling your wagons with memories as you go. Stopping the train will lead to fewer memories, losing time. In life, our time is finite. A train has a schedule to keep up to. If you stop at a point in your life, you’ll then need to speed up in order to catch up. This will make you lose moments in life.

The career kind of train needs to be fast. Maintaining a routine keeps the train steady. Bound to make it fast to the destination.

Either way, you need to identify your wagons and choose what you’ll do with them.

Your Wagons

Wagons can’t be filled in the same volume. You need to identify which wagon is more important to you and keep an analogy between them. If you want more money, you want to emphasize the next wagon more. But if you want a fulfilled family, you can’t have more money as well. There are limits in life, and you have to respect them.

The Financial Wagon

You get on the train. Seats are destroyed. The floor makes weird sounds and windows are blurry from the dirt. You are broke.

This wagon is, sadly, a very important piece of your train. It gets you in motion by offering you the sources you need to build your train.

If you are looking for a complete life with family, love, and affection you might not care about filling this wagon a lot. It’s fine and it’s my choice too. I prefer to have a little bit of everything in life.

Focusing on making one tree beautiful will make you forget about the forest.

If you are looking for a top career, being the best in your field, you need to sacrifice wagons. Some people even leave the love wagon behind to be faster and get to their destination. I respect that choice too, but if they change their minds it might be too late.

The Health Wagon

We often keep this part too empty. I used to, for a long time.

This example I created for you shows exactly why it’s important to give more attention to the health wagon.

Your train needs to functioning. Good health gives a boost to everything else. It’s vital for you to keep your health polished. It doesn’t consume too much of your life to create some more healthy meals or workout for 10 minutes a day.

There’s also your inner health. By taking care of it, you ensure you are more productive. You also avoid random breaks in your journey (depression for instance).

The Relationship Wagon

From personal relationships to being social with people. This wagon is an important piece of your train as well.

People who aim for a complete life surely have a lot of people around them. They are also social and try to fill this wagon with experiences and memories.

But what about the people that aim for a successful career?

Sometimes they get too focused on that financial wagon that they are missing the journey. Maintaining at least a level of human relationships is vital.

The Love Wagon

My favorite wagon. It’s the only wagon that you can have people stay in. You make them a part of your journey and it’s probably the heaviest wagon of them all. Investing in that part fills your journey with more life!

It gives it meaning, a higher one. Yes, by filling this wagon you immediately draw sources from your financial passenger car. But your journey needs colors.

And you need people to enjoy the journey with.

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

― Mark Twain

Final thoughts

If we create analogies, we further understand sections of what we are trying to improve in our life.

Rather than giving actionable solutions to life problems, I presented to you a way of separating your life into train parts. I have no power in your life. You are the driver of your life. YOU are the one who needs to understand which passenger car matters the most.

But I have one thing to mention.

The destination is the end. That’s it. The journey is what lasts a lifetime though.

Now ask yourself. Which part of your train keeps you back?

Originally published on Medium.