The Slow Way Home: What a Bus Ride Taught Me About Wasted Time

Have you ever looked at a chunk of time and decided, before it even started, that it was going to be wasted?

That's where I was standing at a bus stop in Honolulu, watching the minutes tick down on my phone. Eight minutes until the bus. Eight minutes of nothing. I started to pull out my phone just to pass the time.

Instead, I sat down. And I waited.

Today my car is in the shop.

Oil change, possible leak, possibly overnight — the mechanic wasn't sure. I had plans to hang out nearby and work from a café, but as the hours stretched on, I ended up making a call: just take the bus home.

By car, it's about thirty-five minutes. By bus, the route I found would take an hour and twenty-five. On paper, that's fifty minutes of lost time. 

On paper.

But here's what I didn't account for: I can't work in a car. I can't read. I can't think. I'm just... driving.

Those eight minutes at the first bus stop — the ones I had already written off as dead air — turned out to be something I didn't know I needed. I put my phone away. I just sat there. No agenda, no scroll, no podcast filling the quiet. My brain, which had been in “knock out to-do list items” mode all morning, got a moment to breathe. Eight minutes of doing nothing turned out to feel like the most deliberate thing I'd done all day. It actually felt like a proper break. A mental reset.

Then the bus came. Air conditioning. A window seat. Not too crowded. I decided break time was over - I opened my laptop and worked for the next thirty minutes without a single interruption — no traffic to navigate, no light to catch, no one needing anything from me. Just the hum of the bus, my classic Nintendo music playlist in my ears, and a to-do list getting shorter.

Then I had to hop off for a transfer. The transfer was ten minutes. Another chunk of time I might have labeled "wasted." Instead, I used it to start drafting this post — out loud, recording on my phone, pacing at a bus stop in the middle of a Tuesday (Yes, it was actually Tuesday). It turns out ten unscheduled minutes with nowhere to be is actually a pretty good writing environment.

What If I Didn’t Take the Bus?

I think about what the alternative would have looked like. Drive home in thirty-five minutes, pull into the driveway, and then spend the next hour "settling in" — which, if I'm honest, usually means doing random chores around the house and telling myself I'll start working in just a few minutes. The car would have gotten me home faster. It would not have gotten me home better.

The bus ride took longer. But it also gave me focused work time, a rare moment of genuine stillness, and this post.

I'm not ready to sell the car, but today reminded me that the fastest route and the best route aren't always the same thing — and that "wasted time" is often just time we haven't decided how to use yet.

If you've got a trip that's not too far, and you've been writing off the bus as slow or inconvenient, I'd genuinely encourage you to try it once. Not because it's greener or cheaper, though it is both. But because you might get off the bus having done more than you would have sitting in traffic — and having felt, somewhere in the middle of it, like you actually had a minute to yourself.

That's not nothing. In fact, for me, it was quite a lot.

Final Thought

Most of us inherited the assumption that driving is just what you do — it's default, it's efficient, it's adult (buses are for high school kids, amirite?). But efficiency toward what, exactly? If the goal is a day that feels full and intentional rather than just fast, it's worth asking: is this how you'd design it, or is it just what you’re used to?