BUS RIDE HOME

When you’re down and troubled and you need a helping hand,and nothing oh nothing is going right. Where do you go?

Usually, when one is down in the dumps, they search for familiar places and faces to help them get back on track. They may find the comforts of their homes, where they could rant all they want, the most soothing place to be in. At other times, they run to a friend’s house and the feeling of companionship is enough. But there’s no one in the world who would go around talking with strangers on a bus about their misfortunes in life – except for one.

For most people, riding a bus is simply another form of transportation, of going from one place to another. But for this girl, it is a stationary little world full of people from diffent walks of life, each one holding a key to the most sensible story that’s worth listening to, especially at times when one begins to feel downhearted and insignificant.

Every time this girl feels the burden of everyday work, petty intricacies burning her out, she goes to the nearest bus terminal and ride a bus without any particular destination in mind. She sits beside the first person she catch a glimpse of and discreetly start a conversation out of nowhere that eventually leads to topics about life in general. Luckily she possesses an uncanny talent for bringing up serious conversations that in a matter of minutes, the other party suddenly feels comfortable talking to her just about anything she needs to know.

The great thing about this girl is that she never drowns these strangers about her own difficulties in life. Instead, she lets them tell their stories and she listens to them. As the conversation drags on, she’ll realize that certain fact that most of us forget during the most trying times of our lives- that all people have problems of their own, and that almost always, someone out there even has it a lot harder than we do.

At one time, she was close to giving up her current job for the simple reason that she feels like she was being pushed around by the people who holds higher position than her. On her way home, riding a bus, she met someone, looking awfully tired, earning half as much as her own earnings but working for 12 hours. She definitely had it a lot better than she did. But why isn’t she quitting? Because in a developing country like ours where unemployment rate is soaring high, it’s not easy to get a job. And she has to feed her three little kids and her sick husband.

On another separate circumstance, after feeling the pressure of being the breadwinner of the family at such a young age, she met an old, balding man with eyes clouded by cataracts. That old man, having no regrets in life, happily reminisced the times when he was working doubly hard to help his family get by day by day. He did not finish high school, but he learnedso much from experience that he felt very blessed that he had to get through all of that mess when he was young, it made him feel like a complete person worthy of dying any time.

In both cases, she did feel like she is living her life easier than the other and it may not be a good habit to feel pleasure or gratitude out of the hardships that people around us suffer from. But by simply realizing this and that, she learns to appreciate her own blessings and be more accepting of the diffiulties that she encounters . . . because she was able to see her bus ride home as an opportunity to know other people rather than as a simple form of transportation.

A different perspective, that’s what we need. Sometimes, we see things the way we are supposed to see it. A bus is a moving vehicle, but it carries people with stories to tell. And we could always see it as a moving storybook, we just haveto learn how to be the first one to open its pages. The story will not simply unfold by itself, it has to be read. And the girl that I know did just that and she was moved that’s why at the end of her bus ride, she felt like home, and she is not troubled anymore.

In any case, this girl could be you,or me, or someone else, riding a bus going home or going somewhere else. Let’s not simply ride a bus, let’s discover the journey of the people being carried by this life, and begin to see a better way to live our respectivelives…