The Hour You Think You Don’t Have

August 14, 2025

The Hour You Think You Don’t Have

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When you live in a metropolis, speed becomes second nature. You don’t even notice how fast you’re moving until you stop. The tube, the quick bites grabbed between meetings, the constant scanning for the fastest route from point A to point B. It all weaves into an unspoken rule of the city: don’t waste time.

I’ve called London home for a while, and if there’s one thing that city knows how to do, it’s accelerate you. It rushes you through your days, stretches your nights, and convinces you that efficiency is a form of virtue. And yet, now that I’ve been gone for two years, I find myself longing not exactly for the speed of it all, but for the moments where the city forced me to slow down.

Surprisingly, the thing I miss most is not the world-class events or the academic debates that fed my curiosity. Not the dancefloors, the bookstores, the dizzying cultural mix, the chance encounters with brilliant people. Not even the boundless opportunities London spills at your feet.

It’s a red double-decker bus.

More specifically: the upper deck, front row, preferably left-hand seat next to the aisle.

The View From Above

I still remember my first London bus ride: the No. 2, from Tulse Hill to Marylebone. It was the route I took to university, and if you take a look at it on a map, you’ll see it’s no quick hop. Depending on traffic, the ride could stretch to nearly two hours. Two hours that, had I taken the tube, would have been shrunk down to a third of that time.

But what the bus “stole” in minutes, it gave back in meaning.

Upstairs, in that prized front seat, the city unfolded differently. Not as a blur of underground stations and advertisements, but as a living, breathing organism.

I watched high streets transform block by block. Cafés giving way to bookshops. Parks bleeding into council estates. Billboards shifting languages as neighbourhoods changed. From Brixton’s pulsing energy to Marylebone’s quiet elegance, the ride was a moving cross-section of London’s soul.

It wasn’t just what I saw outside. It was the theatre inside, too. My fellow passengers: school kids with their oversized backpacks, nurses fresh off night shifts, tourists clutching guidebooks, office workers glued to their emails. An unspoken community that existed only for the length of the ride.

For once, I wasn’t rushing past them. I wasn’t buried in my phone, trying to maximise productivity in every stolen minute. I was simply there — observing, absorbing, existing.

A Moving Meditation

Here’s the part that sounds a little unbelievable, especially to anyone caught up in big-city life: those bus rides became my most creative hours.

I didn’t plan it that way. It just happened.

Something about the combination of steady movement, panoramic view, and the hum of anonymous company put my mind in a different gear. Thoughts untangled themselves.

Some rides sparked ideas, little bursts of creativity that amazed and hyped me each time they occurred. Others gave me the chance to process the mess of emotions that living in a big city and a foreign country can stir up. Some days, the bus was simply a pause button, a way to breathe, to observe, to remind myself that life isn’t only about the next deadline or destination.

I scribbled or voice-recorded notes into my phone, fragments of half-born ideas. Other times, I just let them drift in and out, like clouds. Most of those thoughts are gone now (along with the old phone that stored them), but it doesn’t matter.

The value wasn’t in capturing them. It was in the processing, the chance to sit with my own mind without forcing it.

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Taking Your Time or Giving You Time?

The tube gets you where you need to go. Quickly. Efficiently. Without distraction. And that’s the problem.

The tube is a tunnel. Literally and metaphorically. You’re sealed underground, your world shrunk to the radius of the carriage. You scroll your phone, stare at the floor, maybe read a book if you can find space to hold it. The only view is an advert urging you to buy something you don’t need.

It’s the perfect transport for a city addicted to productivity: shave off minutes, streamline, optimise. But in saving time, you lose something else.

You lose the chance to wander. To notice. To think.

The bus, in its very inefficiency, gives you those things back.

When you choose speed every time, you sacrifice the unplanned moments. The unexpected though. The subtle shift in perspective that comes not from rushing and doing more, but from doing less.

For Anyone Still in the Rush

Maybe you’re reading this while rushing between meetings, or squeezed on a crowded tube, or mentally calculating the fastest route to your next commitment. And maybe you’re thinking: This is sentimental nonsense. Who has the time?

But that’s exactly why this matters.

Because what I learned in those London years, and only fully appreciated after leaving, is that slowing down isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.

We all need spaces where we’re not performing, producing, or rushing.

Places where our minds can wander without an agenda.

For me, that place happened to be a moving bus. For you, it might be somewhere else. But the principle holds: We need to give ourselves permission to go slower.

A Challenge

If you’re reading this while living in London, or New York, or Paris, or any metropolis where everyone is rushing, here’s my invitation to you: try the bus.

Take one ride this week. Sit on the top deck if you can. Aim for the front seat. Don’t scroll your phone. Don’t fill the time with podcasts or calls. Just look out the window. Watch your city. Watch yourself thinking.

And see what thoughts come knocking when you finally give them room.

Yes, it will take longer. That’s the point.

You may discover that the slowness you’ve been avoiding is the very thing your mind has been craving.

And who knows, maybe that hour you “wasted” will turn out to be the most valuable one of your week.

What I Carry With Me

It’s been two years since I last rode that No. 2. These days, I live where buses are few and far between, where fields stretch farther than roads, and where silence is the dominant soundtrack. Life is slower here, but it’s a different kind of slow — still, grounded, sometimes even heavy.

London buses gave me a moving kind of stillness. A way to see the world and myself in motion, without urgency. That’s what I miss most.

I know I’ll ride one again someday. Until then, I carry the lesson with me: the fastest route isn’t always the better one.

Sometimes, the long way round is exactly where you need to be.