The bus is always late.

It is rare for me to venture onto public transit, but today in London, that is what I'll do, for the first time, alone, as Grace wraps things up at our first stay in Europe. Even rarer, though, is it for me to wear headphones in public. . . because I have long found that there is something in the silence that is more entertaining than any song or podcast: there are thoughts I otherwise quite easily condemn to the far reaches of my mind.

In the communal silence of the train, or overhearing a conversation on a bus, there they typically surface. But today is different, at least for now, as I round the street corner.

25 feet ahead is my bus stop, and headphones sit in my ears. There stands an elderly gentleman, resting his left arm on the sign as his right hand sits steady on a cane. In my head, I began to argue: to remove my headphones and leave room for conversation, or to leave them in and mind myself? A short duel ends in a draw – I remove the left, and leave the right.

As I come to the edge of the road, it doesn't take long for this man to glance my way, and in his glance I find myself thinking, what a cold world today must be where all is digital. And how rare a conversation must be, at a bus stop like this, but how common, I am certain, it must've once been. My instinct, rarely followed but often right, says we are bound for another destination.

A second glance brings with it conversation: today, we both agree, the bus is late. And that, we both agree, is not unusual (I have no idea, I've been here two weeks). Soon, the golden question: the gentleman asks, "Where are you from?" It's a question I'm all too familiar with, despite my best attempts to hide my nationality (which includes, and is limited to, not talking too loudly) out of some weird, unfounded fear of being judged for . . . being from somewhere else? or something.

But on this treacherous 89º day in southeastern London, muttering a few words is about all I can do. And for the first time in my life, a quiet (though patriotically confident) "I'm from America," is immediately met with, "I would've guessed Australia."

That's more exciting than America, or the common runner up of Canada, and today, baking in a sort of outback of my own, I'll take it.

The time for arrival – and departure – has long since passed: the bus is, as we confidently determined, behind. But that is alright with us both, because in the sheet metal and glass of a Transport London bus, one enters a sauna of the unwilling. My specific tenure, though, does not simply end after one: it will be an hour and a half until I get back to my wife and take note: if you are, as I soon will be, ever lucky enough to enter an iconic double-decker bus, more room is often met with more sweaty people, of, I should note, many nationalities and races and languages, also attempting to face a blistering summer with a subtle sense of (adopted) British Superiority.

At what was once our home, I return to a home nearly finalized: with sheets in the dryer, a kitchen well cleaned, and carpets freshly urinated on – thrice – by a 13 year old beagle. In a few hours, the owner of both home and dog will return. But dominated by moving everything we own from West London to East, and further corralled by attempting – and failing – to clean dog urine and remove stains out of the carpet of a $1,900,000 home, all is well, because in a few hours, my wife and I will be long gone – on some southeasterly train, making our way to a place we have yet to even settle.

So, I have been very distracted, and accordingly – I have not been very creative. With the goal of writing for a living, most days it feels as though I could – can – hardly summon a sentence, let alone write a paragraph. As someone infinitely wiser than me once said, "A double minded man is unstable in all his ways."

So I do wish I could go back to this weekend, and venture back through a town an hour west of London, Richmond upon Thames, home to the very church where the first King of England was ever crowned; where the river Thames is far more blue and content than brown and ambivalent. Because sitting on the riverbank, I had not yet attempted to be, well, anything.

The rhythms of this place! In London, where you wait on a bus that runs late simply because, or where the weather impedes on man and his every move and can not be ignored by the hum of central HVAC, I am shown some eternal truth:

I control a lot less than I think I do.

There is no thought more humbling. Because in my daily endeavors – whether it be catching a bus, and then a train, and then a bus again, I shake hands with, and attempt to outgrip, the force that controls my life.

When you are forced to wait for a bus, aren't you asked to surrender for a moment?

And when the heatwave descends on this little island empire, aren't all – both her subjects and her visitors – forced to accommodate?

The creative endeavor – whatever that looks like for you – is much the same: it, too, does not arrive on time, and it, too, does not exist to make you comfortable.

And at the moment, I can not help but feel like a fraud, an empty vessel.

What is that? Why am I so entirely dominated by it – and what is it?

Because for 5 years I've lived under the fear of failure. And the people I aspire to be like, the role models I have . . . some faced that very fear for far longer than 5 years . . . but then, some faced it for far fewer. Nevertheless, they are to me proof that inevitably, I will become the man; the writer; the husband; the creative, that exists on a bus I have yet to see, at a stop I have yet to reach.

What could be more creative-like that to be ruled by a force or feeling incalculable? What could be more terrifying that to bet your entire life on something you can not see, or – even worse – can not prove true (just yet)?

Maybe it is best to simply rest in the fact, rather than the fear. If I was supposed to know more today than I do, I would. And if I was supposed to be further ahead today than I am, I would be. And if all of this is useless – then why have I come so far?

Perhaps because it is not.