Travellers on a Train

Last month I learned I had passed the final paper. After eight years, I am now a group analyst. And as I prepare to step out of the institution that has held me for so long, my thoughts keep turning away from theories and qualifications and toward trains. It’s an odd connection, perhaps, but endings have their own constellation. They pull images out of the dark. At the same time, I’ve brought two long‑standing reflective practice groups to a close, and these three farewells have begun to shine light towards one another.

The groups had been running for years. People came and went in the way travellers do. Some stayed only long enough to warm a seat. Others returned term after term until their faces became part of the furniture of the screen. A few disappeared without explanation. One or two left in anger. Some seemed disappointed by me from the beginning. Others spoke as though the group had moved the axis of their lives.

Before training, I imagined groups as coherent entities: bounded and intentional. But over time I think they became more like railway carriages: temporary gatherings of strangers heading in roughly the same direction, for reasons not always known even to themselves.

Journeys kept appearing in our conversations. Someone joked they spent half their life waiting on cold platforms for trains they couldn’t get on. Someone else joined each week from a glamorous living room that turned out to be an AI‑generated background. Another returned us again and again to questions of hospitality and obligation: the quiet economies of care. Someone remembered long train journeys where strangers unpacked food as though kinship were assumed.

“Everything came out,” they said. “Eggs. Bread. Tea. Pickles. Chicken. Everyone shared.”

Someone laughed. “Try doing that on the Tube.”

We laughed with them, but the image stayed. The idea that journeys need not be endured alone. That sometimes people travel together without pretending they belong to one another.

I wonder whether training groups (and work life) are not much the same. People board at different stations. Some arrive full of certainty and leave full of questions. Others arrive full of questions and leave with different ones. Some stay for the whole journey. Others step off early. We sit opposite one another for years, sharing landscapes, delays, breakdowns, frustrations, discoveries, and the occasional moment of unexpected companionship.

Not everyone becomes a friend. Long trainings create a strange intimacy: people know things about one another that ordinary friends never know, yet friendship is not guaranteed. Some relationships deepen. Some remain polite. Some are marked by irritation, misunderstanding, difference. Some people challenge us in ways we never welcome. Some carry parts of ourselves we would rather not meet. And yet, when the journey ends, even with the relief of their departure, something in us knows these relationships mattered.

Recently, a fellow traveller called our interactions “complicated” and said he was aware we represented something difficult to each other, but was glad we had shared a space. I agreed. Complicated feels right.

Across these years, I have become increasingly interested in belonging: who is welcomed, who is excluded, what groups can bear to know about themselves, and what they struggle to acknowledge. Perhaps this is why I was drawn to group analysis in the first place. Yet one of the unexpected lessons has been that belonging is rarely a matter of finding people who think as we do. Chosen groups bring their own anxieties about status, acceptance, power. More often, the work of community is learning how to remain in relationship with difference — knowing that not all differences can or should be reconciled. Perhaps groups are not places where differences disappear at all. Perhaps they are places where differences are lived with.

As the years passed, I found myself less interested in agreement and more interested in how people remain alongside one another when agreement proves impossible. The task, I think, is neither rescue nor retreat. It is to remain present without taking over, to contribute without controlling, to disagree without disappearing, to leave without destroying what has been shared. Like most worthwhile journeys, this was easier to understand in theory than in practice.

As training ends, people ask where they will find the fairy tales now. Others speak of staying in touch. There is warmth in this, and loss. But I keep returning to the image of the train. Strangers sharing food. Temporary companions. People who know they are not family, yet behave for a while as though the journey itself creates obligations of care.

Soon enough, everyone reaches their station. Some step off quietly. Some embrace. Some exchange phone numbers they will never use. Others have already formed a WhatsApp group. Some continue travelling on. The carriage empties and refills. The train moves on.

The achievement was never arriving at the same destination. It was that, for a time, we travelled together: for a time looking out of the same windows, trying to make sense of the passing landscape.