19/2025: Math of the heart.

Image © Jose 2025

Sometime thirty years ago I lived 12 miles from work, which does not seem a lot, but I had the gruesome IC19 in my way, it was my “Cabo das Tormentas”. For 3 years I would take never less than an hour to get to work and come back home, sometimes 90m, many times 2 to 3 hours, all it took was a fender bender and we would all be stuck. During that time, I tried everything, from leaving earlier or late, to listening to radio (this was before the podcast revolution), thinking, singing, talking out loud, a few times screaming, nothing helped. I could not shake the fact that I was spending an incredible amount of time of my life in the car, stuck in traffic. For someone that used to say I didn’t have time to sleep because there was so much to do, you can see how this was traumatic, and I always avoided repeating this.

When we moved to Boston we were looking for a nice place to live, we loved Jamaica Plain, the diverse, warm, opinionated people. You hear languages, see strollers and tattoos, and always feel welcome. The food reflects it all: pupusas, tacos, pho, wood-fired pizza, handmade ice cream. But people warned us, getting out of JP in the morning and onto 93 North via the tunnels was a Cape of Storms. They were right. Six months later we started looking for a different place to live, and ended up in Charlestown, after the tunnels but still in Boston. Charlestown is tight-knit, proud, and steeped in history. Brick, granite, and old stories everywhere (go read about the bank robbers). You’ll find locals who’ve been here for generations alongside newcomers drawn to the views and the vibe. We liked our house, loved our neighbors, hated the industrial facilities around working night and day. Later we ended up in Medford, a nice and cozy sort of loft, best thing about it, 30min max to and from work, without getting on a highway.

We are now technically living in an island, that has a causeway built around the 1900s, a quiet peninsula surrounded by ocean. It’s salty, weathered, low-key. A mix of old families, artists, and people who love the sea. It has a very attentive police force that loves to ambush drivers that do not respect the speed limit, and unless you live there or have a parking permit, hard to stop anywhere, lucky not our problem anymore! But, once again we were warned, getting out and in via the only way out and in, can be again a Cape of Storms, which depending on the time of the year and how rough the ocean is on both sides of the causeway, can literally turn into one. And after this first week of driving to/ from work, I can attest, it is miserable, never less than an hour.

When we change, anything in our lives, even when we were the ones doing the changing, we always lose something. But this win/ lose math is a math of the head. Via this math of the head, I am now further away from work, I will probably take 90m or longer to get to work, via the inside roads with the morning school traffic, and the infinite amount of traffic lights and stop signs, the potholes and the occasional unruly pedestrian and firetruck. I end up in the highway, bumper to bumper. Yes, I am back to the longer podcasts, have a few audiobooks lined up, will call some folks while driving. But the math of the head will always show a negative balance. But then I do the math of the heart, when I leave in the morning, I can’t do more than 25 miles per hour for a while, and then not more than 45, I am forced to start slow. When I come back, and especially now when the sun sets down later in the afternoon, there is this moment where suddenly you see the ocean, right in front of you. So I started stopping in the exact same place and taking a photo from inside the car, I plan to do a collage at some point, or all the different snapshots, at different times of the year. That moment brings a ton of joy to the heart, positive credits. Then, you enter the causeway, and you have to slow down, and if you open your passenger window you have the seagulls right there, the North Shore and the beaches across the water, and further out the Boston skyline with planes in and out from Logan International. You open the window and you get that maritime air rushing through the car, sometimes bitterly cold, awakening from any torpor you might have found yourself in while driving. And the math of the heart overloads, by the time I am forced to slow down again, the body is awakened, the senses refreshed, the heart is full. And the win/ lose account is back to zero.