Threshold: The MRT and the Art of In-Between
The doors will open. We will step through. We will become kinetic, purposeful, moving. But first: this. The waiting. The threshold. The becoming. We spend our lives crossing thresholds. Waking, leaving, arriving, returning; but rarely pause to feel the crossing itself.
The train arrives like a thought completing itself. Through the platform's open sides, Bangkok sprawls in its glorious, exhaust-hazed specificity. The never-ending tuk-tuks negotiating impossible geometries, street vendors conducting their alchemies of heat and flavor, the sky bleached white by equatorial confidence.
The Japanese have a word: ma. 間 A thought-provoking concept on negative space framed as a pause in time, an interval or emptiness in space. Ma is the time and space life needs to breath, to feel and connect. The elevated platform is pure ma in 35-degree heat.
A dozen or so commuters arrange themselves with the precision of a corps de ballet. A concept that is by no means foreign to this Singaporean. But it always amuses me how we, as humans, fall into these placements. Each knowing, through some acquisition of knowledge that bypassed conscious learning entirely, exactly where and how to arrange ourselves. We are rather sophisticated apes, we humans. We've built machines that float on magnetism and move hundreds of tons with the whisper of electricity, yet we still position ourselves tribally, optimising for a two-second advantage in the eternal competition for seats.
The train's approach generates its own weather system: a warm wind, a rising pitch, that peculiar moment when something massive pretends to be graceful. The pneumatic sigh. The alignment. The collective lean. We are forever crossing thresholds, but rarely do we cross them this literally, this punctually.
I want to say something profound about thresholds. About how we're all suspended between departure and arrival, neither where we were nor where we're going. About liminal space as metaphor for the modern condition. But standing here, sweating slightly despite having spent my entire life in the tropics, what I'm actually thinking about is whether I positioned myself at the right door.
This is the gap between how we think we experience the world and how we actually do. Virginia Woolf wrote about "moments of being" and the MRT pulling into the platform could be such a moment, if I let it be. The pneumatic sigh of brakes. The alignment of doors. The collective lean forward.
But mostly it's just transit. Mostly I'm checking my phone.
And feeling embarrassed about trying to aestheticise the mundane, to find poetry in a commute. It's the impulse of someone who doesn't have to take this train every day, who gets to treat the ordinary infrastructure of other people's lives as material for contemplation. The woman next to me isn't meditating on thresholds. She's carrying way too many bags and is struggling to balance. The teenager with earbuds isn't thinking about ma. He's probably thinking about whatever seventeen-year-olds think about, which is probably more interesting than my belaboured observations about negative space.
Tourism makes philosophers of us all, but it's a shallow philosophy. I'll probably take this train three times during my stay in Bangkok and think deep thoughts about collective choreography and liminal space. Then I'll leave. The train will continue running without my attention. The threshold will remain a threshold whether or not anyone notices its threshold-ness.
And yet. And yet there's something that happens when you try to pay attention, even if the attention is performative, even if you're aware of performing it. The doors open. We step through. For just a moment, before my mind wanders back to lunch plans or whatever low-level anxiety is currently running in the background, I actually see it. That strange coordinated grace of strangers moving in unison, the trust we place in steel and schedules, the minor miracle of arriving where you intended to arrive.
It doesn't last. The moment collapses back into ordinariness almost immediately. The train fills with the silence of people near each other who have agreed to pretend they're alone. Someone's bag presses against my leg. The AC is too cold now. We're moving.
But I can't quite shake the feeling that something happened back there on the platform, in that stretched second before the doors opened. Not enlightenment. Not even a particularly original observation. Just the bare fact of noticing and of pulling my attention away from its default spiral of self-reference long enough to register that all these other people are as real as I am, going somewhere as specific as I am, experiencing this threshold with the same mix of distraction and purpose.
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
We spend our lives crossing thresholds. Most of them we cross while thinking about something else entirely. Maybe that's fine. Maybe trying to be present for every transition would be as annihilating as the grass-growing roar Eliot warned about. Maybe the occasional moment of noticing is all we can manage.
The train pulls into Ekkamai station. I've already stopped paying attention. The threshold is behind me. I'm thinking about lunch. If this resonated, subscribe below.
BANGKOK, THAILAND
JULY 2025