IF you’re worried that life has been oddly good to you as of late, take public transportation in Manila to even things out.
Take a psychedelic jeep, a tilting bus, or if you recently hit the lottery, the MRT. Do it during rush hours, when queues pile up longer than the trains themselves, and the concepts of personal space and chivalry go up in smokes. You’ll see in an instant what you’ve been missing out on.
Anyway, there hasn’t been any particular stroke of luck that came my way lately, but I took a bus last week, simply because I needed to go somewhere without spending much on fare.
I found a seat just before a horde of passengers boarded. The vehicle filled up soon after, and in the curious culture of Filipino public transportation where seats aren’t the only place for paying passengers, the aisle was quickly crowded with standing people, most of them bearing long faces of exhaustion following another long day. The usual.
It was an ugly sight, absurd, but—again—every day. People go through that hell all the time; some multiple times in a day, some for years on end. Unfortunately, our bus’s conductor fit that vicious bill.
He wasn’t an agile twentysomething or a snobbish, beer-bellied tito. He was old, but young enough to wade through the crowd and collect fare.
Standing beside me was a guy in a purple shirt with both his arms clutching onto the railings. The conductor called his attention and politely asked him to move to the back of the bus so that incoming passengers have room to stand in front.
The guy refused and went berserk. “Wala na ngang uusugan eh! Saan pa ’ko pupunta, ’yung mga tao sa likod ’yung pausugin mo, ’wag ako!”
The sudden aggression caught the conductor off-guard, but his response to the passenger was even more surprising. He replied in a cool, composed tone: “Sige po, sir, ok lang.”
The passenger, along with all the passengers paying attention to the exchange, was not expecting that display of pacifism. Later on, the conductor proceeded to collect fares and reached the spot of the standing passenger, now level-headed. He tried to extend his apologies through a petty small talk. “Di ako maka-usog kanina kasi wala akong magalawan. ’Yung mga tao kasi sa likod oh.”
The conductor replied, “Walang problema ’yun, boss. Dito na ko sa bus tumanda—24 ako nun, 58 na ko ngayon….”
“…walang nagbago?” the passenger tried to finish the thought.
“Wala talaga,” the conductor said in agreement.
It’s utterly deplorable the crappy public-transport system and the equally crappy attitude of most passengers have been the everyday reality for more than three decades by the account of the conductor. But the bigger takeaway was how he endured all those years to witness it all.
If my math and the conductor’s accuracy serves us right, he has been balancing on speeding buses to collect money and hand out tickets for 33 years now.
Three decades are not a short amount of time.
Did he feel every second of it? Or did it just pass him by? I imagined him being a bright-eyed 24-year-old who was just happy to get a job, and before he knew it, he’s 30 years older, asking a guy in a purple shirt to move a bit.
The thought that time flies brought me back to the viral story of the late Pulitzer winner Alex Tizon for The Atlantic, titled “My Family’s Slave”. In that superbly written piece about their family’s helper that hits home for Filipino readers, he wrote, “Coming to America had been a mad dash, and before we caught a breath a decade had gone by. We turned around, and a second decade was closing out.”
Perhaps the same is true for that conductor who was taken by the gushing pace of time. But then again, doesn’t it apply to all of us? Seconds turn to minutes, days to months, years to decades, and a whole lifetime into mere sentences.
Having the luxury of time is one of the greatest misconception people live with. Not only can life pull the rug under one’s feet at any instant, but it can also pass by in a jiffy, like nothing happened.
At the rate time operates, living in every moment is our best bet to stay awake. Besides, life, as American poet Robert Frost summed up life in three words, “it goes on”. Whether we have our eyes open or closed, life goes on.