What the 28 tram knows about patience

The 28 tram takes forty minutes to cross four kilometres of Lisbon. It is not broken. It is the route — up through Graça, around the cathedral, down to the river and up again, on rails laid for a city that walked.

Tourists ride it for the photograph. Residents ride it because it is the only thing that climbs our street. For years I resented it. I would stand at the stop with my phone out, watching the little dot on the map not move, doing the arithmetic of everything I could have done instead.

The arithmetic is wrong

What I eventually noticed is that the arithmetic was wrong. The forty minutes were not being taken from me. They were the only forty minutes of the day nobody else had planned.

On the tram you cannot do much. The carriage sways too much to type. The windows are too good to ignore. An old man always gets on at Largo da Graça with a bag of oranges, and he always tells the driver the same joke about the hill. A schoolgirl in the back reads the same battered novel every morning, a page or two a stop. I know the shop that sells only buttons. I know which balcony has the parrot.

None of this is useful. That is its use.

Slowness is a kind of attention

We talk about slowness as if it were a speed. It is not. It is a kind of attention: the willingness to let a thing take the time it takes, and to look at what is in front of you while it does.

The tram does not make me patient. It simply refuses to hurry, and leaves me alone with the city until I stop arguing. Most mornings now I leave the phone in my bag. I am not more productive for it. I am more here, which turns out to be the thing I was trying to produce.

Lena · 20 September 2026, Lisbon