The train is late again. Not catastrophically late — the kind of late that reminds you that you’re not really in control though. You’re not getting sacked, your boss won’t even pull you in for an unofficial word about your timings, but it’s the sort of delay that makes you question why you even bother setting alarms.

Around me, people shuffle and tap at their phones like nervous birds pecking at a barren field. They’re all pretending to be busy, but no one knows what they’re looking for.

Commuting is a lot like life really — it’s all stops and starts and delays that weren’t part of the plan. You can’t control everything, but you do gradually learn how to make the most of the mess left behind for you.

When the train does roll into the station, I sit by the window, leaning my head against it. The world outside scrolls past in a blur, like postcards from a mundane suburban life — only nobody’s really sending postcards anymore, are they? Way too much effort for too little return. I don’t know if I’ve ever sent a postcard to be honest.

We’ve lost momentum on our already protracted, painfully prolonged commute now. The slideshow grinds to a halt. My eyes, desperate for stimulation, latch onto a billboard plastered onto the back end of a car (van?). One of those rolling adverts that you usually see plastered with an empty plea of ‘ADVERTISE HERE’.

This one though, had found a taker — an ad for premium countertops. Those gleaming, glossy, granite countertops — ‘your dream kitchen.’

The target audience for this brand of ads is the well-to-do types, the moderately rich, the pinning their hopes and aspirations on a fat slab of igneous rock kind of people. But will their shiny new kitchen really do anything for them more than just hold their cuppa? We’re all guilty of pouring ourselves into such mundane, useless things. We all want glossy and perfect lives — effortless commutes, flawless kitchens, perfect eggs. But life, like a delayed train or a stubborn omelette, often has other ideas. It’s in those moments — the burnt toast mornings, the broken shell dawns — where you really learn to improvise.

Speaking of eggs though — did you know there’s not actually a definite origin for who first cooked an omelette? Go ahead, Google it if you don’t believe me. There’s a few people who claim to have originated it. The French like to claim it, but the Romans and Persians were known to have been beating and whisking eggs well before Paris ever had a café.

Someone on TikTok said they’re easy to master, omelettes, but that’s a widely spread lie. They’re deceptive. They demand just the right amount of heat, just the right flick of the wrist, and even then, the odds still might not be in your favour.

But say you dedicated your entire year to perfecting the lost art of omelettes — pouring hour after hour into the perfect whisk, the perfect fold — what would you have to show for it beyond a year’s worth of cracked eggs and a fridge that smells faintly of regret and wasted time? But at the same time…perhaps along the way you’d find a sense of purpose? A meaning hidden in amongst the mess? Or if none of that, at least you’ll have gotten to enjoy a shit tonne of scrambled egg along the way. Doesn’t sound too bad does it?

I think there’s something deeply underrated about failing at something so low stakes. It’s a necessary reminder that messing up isn’t the be-all and end-all, it’s 100% survivable. Life’s full to the brim of these ‘omelette moments’ — those times where you throw yourself into something with all the best intentions and hope, and maybe it falls apart, but you still enjoy the ride. It might be a scrambled mess, but at least it’s your scrambled mess.

The train eventually groans back to life, creaking forward as if it isn’t entirely convinced that this journey was worth the effort. I can feel the collective relief amongst my fellow passengers — though if we’re being honest, it’s not really relief. It’s more a palpable sense of resignation. We are all just people trying to get somewhere and hoping we don’t grind to a complete halt along the way.

But stopping when you want to be starting, in its own way, teaches you something too. Like how to read the train delay boards at a glance, wordlessly bond with strangers through shared sighs and knowing looks, and the art of letting go when things don’t go to plan. The train might be late, the omelette might end up a mess, but life moves on.

So maybe the answer isn’t to avoid failure altogether, but to lean into it. To trust that in the mess of cracked shells and burnt edges, there’s something worth salvaging. Trust the process, and savour the ride — even if all you end up with is a plate of scrambled eggs and delayed trains.

The train finally pulls into the station, a full ten minutes late, but here I am, anyway — ready to face the day. In the end, a delayed train and a messed up breakfast aren’t so different, they’re both just reminders that life rarely sticks to its schedules. But maybe that’s where you find the good stuff: in the waiting, the chaos, the mishmash that you end up in on your way to your destination.