There is a platform I know well. It stands at Obermodern, a village in Alsace, facing fields that stretch beyond the railway line. Early in the morning, before the day begins, people gather there in near silence: workers and students still half-asleep, waiting in the cold light. Sometimes birds call from somewhere in the grass. Then the train arrives, and everyone boards slowly, settling into the rhythm of the journey. Outside the window, the colza fields turn bright yellow in spring.
I shared that platform sometimes with my father, who takes this train every morning. I only travelled with him occasionally, but those mornings stayed with me because nothing remarkable happened there. They made small things visible.
Growing up in Alsace means growing up inside a landscape shaped by borders, languages, and memory. French and German coexist naturally in daily life, sometimes alongside Alsatian. Here, history never feels distant: it lives in accents, architecture, family stories, and place names. I did not choose this inheritance, but it shaped the way I move through it, attentively, aware that a place carries more than its surface reveals.
When I think about sustainability, I do not think first of statistics. I think instead about the difference between passing through a place and inhabiting it. As I live in a rural village, I know that ecological questions are rarely abstract. The car is often a necessity rather than a choice, and I feel that tension each time I use one. Yet this year in Strasbourg, moving through the city by bicycle taught me another rhythm of travel: slower, more attentive, and more connected to places. Sustainable travel, to me, begins there. It lies in learning to receive what a place offers with patience and respect, rather than only reducing environmental impact.
The journey to Leicester will itself be part of that approach. I intend to travel entirely by rail: from Obermodern to Strasbourg, then Paris, London, and finally Leicester. Choosing the train over air travel is, for me, a concrete way of supporting the principles behind climate action and more sustainable mobility. Once in Leicester, I plan to rely primarily on walking, and cycling in daily life, contributing in small but consistent ways to the urban sustainability promoted by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 11 on sustainable cities and communities and SDG 13 on climate action. I also hope to continue exploring Britain by train whenever possible. These choices may seem small, but I believe daily habits matter, I believe that how you travel shapes how you arrive, and how you arrive shapes how you understand a place.
I tend, by nature, to live too much in the future. But the mornings at Obermodern taught me something different: that attention is a form of presence. One day I will stand again on that same platform, returning from Leicester to Alsace, and I hope to have learned something simple but lasting: how to inhabit a place rather than merely pass through it.
