There’s a saying that sometimes doing the same thing differently can produce a different result. I don’t know who came up with it, but after today’s experience, I think they were onto something.
For the past six months, getting to work has felt like a daily puzzle. The journey itself isn’t difficult. I take a train, make a connection, and then hop on a bus. The real challenge has always been that last bus. To make matters worse, the bus stop I need shares the same name as another route. Every morning, all the buses seem to arrive at the same time, and there I am trying to figure out which one is actually mine. Since my Japanese is still very much a work in progress, what should be a simple commute often feels like navigating a maze before the day has even started.
Because of that, I developed a habit. Instead of taking the earlier bus, I would wait for a later one because English was available. It wasn’t ideal, but at least I knew I was getting on the right bus. The downside was that I was almost always fifteen minutes late for work. After a while, I accepted it as one of those things I simply had to live with.
Of course, there were also the days when I got it completely wrong. The days I confidently boarded the wrong bus and ended up somewhere I had absolutely no business being. Those were usually followed by an expensive taxi ride because there wasn’t enough time to turn back and start again. If you’ve ever taken a taxi in Japan, you’ll understand why I’m still recovering emotionally from those experiences 😂.
Not once or twice… about four different times. Every time it happened, I told myself it would be the last time.
As the month turned to September, I embraced change. Instead of focusing only on the bus stop name, I wrote down the entire route and destination. My thinking was simple. Even if my Japanese wasn’t perfect, I could show the driver where I was going and confirm whether I was on the right bus. Looking back, the solution was surprisingly simple, but sometimes the simplest solutions are the ones we overlook because we’ve become used to doing things a certain way.
Today, it worked.
For the first time in what felt like forever, I got on the right bus without stress, confusion, second-guessing, or silent panic. I arrived at work twenty minutes early and felt far happier than any reasonable person should feel about boarding public transportation correctly. I was so relieved that I found myself silently praying for the driver and wishing him a wonderful day.
The funny thing is that the bus wasn’t really the lesson. What stayed with me was the reminder that sometimes we become so focused on trying harder that we forget to try differently. We keep approaching the same problem from the same angle and wonder why nothing changes. Then one small adjustment, one new approach, one tiny shift in perspective changes everything.
After six months of confusion, wrong turns, late arrivals and a few painful taxi fares, all it took was looking at the problem differently.
It felt good to learn that lesson today.
With Stories Always,
Yhem💕
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