Two trains running

Two trains running
One train runs at midnight
The other runs at the break of day

— With apologies to McKinley Morganfield, the blues singer known as Muddy Waters

Two trains run for all of us. Most of us are riding that midnight train.

The midnight train runs on time. In fact, it runs in time.

It's brightly lit inside, full of people on the move, charging ahead. They know where the journey will end and approximately how long it will take to get there, but they try not to think about it much. Meanwhile, they amuse themselves as best they can. They talk, eat, listen to their iPods, play computer games, swig a Coke or a Budweiser.

The landmarks and the stations slip by. Faster and faster, it seems, as the time passes. And eventually, the terminal is in sight.

There's the other train. It's dark inside. Inside, where we're not used to looking, and not very comfortable when we do. Time doesn't matter here. We aren't traveling in time or space.

We're not too sure where we're going. Others have left descriptions for us, but they're hard to understand. Some accounts of the destination seem like fairy tales. Too good to be true. And so paradoxical. A supreme Light that is also supreme Darkness. An infinite knowledge hidden in a Cloud of Unknowing. Enlightenment but also "nothing special."

We're not even sure we've caught the right train to take us there. We just feel that, somewhere on down the line, our true goal and end is waiting.

Two trains running
I said, I said, I said
Two trains running
Well, well, well
One train runs at midnight
I said, I said, I said
One train runs at midnight
The other runs …
Well, well, well
The other runs …
I said, I said, I said
The other runs at the break of day.