I have found myself returning to Train Dreams again and again. Not always by watching it. Sometimes in fragments. Sometimes in memory. And sometimes in a place beyond memory, where certain images or sensations drift in without warning and settle quietly somewhere inside me. The film has become less of an object I’ve viewed and more of a space I now visit. A landscape I enter without planning to.
But this is not about Train Dreams anymore.
This is about the journeys we seldom acknowledge.
There are days when I feel painfully aware of how small we are. How brief. How limited by the boundaries of our existence. We are born, we stumble through the years allotted to us, and then we leave. And in the vast theatre of human history and beyond that, the unfathomable scale of the universe our little lives seem too minor to matter. Too fragile to leave even the faintest mark.
Yet the more I sit with this thought, the more I realise that the smallness we fear is an illusion.
Our lives may not be large, but they are infinitely deep.
Every single person carries within them an entire cosmos – not metaphorically, but truly. An internal expanse shaped by every joy they’ve felt, every grief they’ve endured, every memory they cling to, every conversation that altered them in ways they couldn’t explain, every moment of surrender, every moment of courage, every dream that died and every dream that insisted on living.
These inner worlds are so vast that we often spend a lifetime trying to understand even a fraction of our own selves. How can that be insignificant?
Think of how each of us negotiates with love. How we navigate heartbreak. How we find ourselves in unexpected friendships or lose ourselves in familiar relationships. How we learn to forgive, or fail to. How we grieve : not just for people, but for versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown. How we break things beyond repair, and how we find the strength to begin again from the fragments.
Our relationships with nature, with creation, with destruction, with the people who bruise us and the people who heal us are nothing but universes in motion.
And yet we pass through life unaware of this magnificence.
We rarely pause to look inward long enough.
We rarely celebrate what is uniquely ours.
Perhaps it is because we have been taught to measure significance by the world’s applause. By what is seen. By what is recorded. But the truth I keep rediscovering is that the most extraordinary parts of our journey happen in the quiet. In the unseen. In the internal spaces no one else witnesses.
We love to imagine the soul as something that outlives us. Something that slips out of the body and continues into other lives, carrying its karmic luggage. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But lately, I’ve begun to feel that the soul is not waiting elsewhere. It isn’t a prize at the end of the road. It isn’t an invisible passport between lifetimes.
The soul might simply be the journey itself.
The lived experience.
The inner narrative.
The continuous becoming.
Every moment that shakes us awake. That is the soul.
Every moment that softens us. That is the soul.
Every moment we choose tenderness over impulse, forgiveness over pride, curiosity over fear – the soul grows a little more defined.
We are not travelling toward eternity.
We are carrying it within us.
Maybe that’s why Train Dreams stayed with me. Because beneath its landscapes and silences, beneath its stories of love and loss, it holds a quiet truth: that the life of one ordinary man is as expansive, as mysterious, and as eternal as the wilderness he walks through. That every human journey no matter how private or humble is worthy of being witnessed.
And in witnessing his journey, I found myself turning inward to mine.
To the roads I’ve travelled.
The ones I’ve abandoned.
The ones that still wait patiently for me to take the first step.
Perhaps this is what cinema sometimes gives us. Not answers, not lessons, not conclusions, but a moment of stillness in which we can finally hear the faint echo of our own universe.
I think that’s why I keep returning to this film in my mind.
Not for the story.
Not for the craft.
But because somewhere in its quiet, I heard something of myself.
Something of the journey I’m still trying to understand.
Something of the soul I’m still in the process of becoming.
Hansal mehta 