Strangers on a Bus

Next to a stranger:

Do you make yourself busy? Stare fixed in the distance?

Do you say a quick hello and then flicker away your eyes, ending potential conversation...polite and nothing more?

That's my bus! (photo thanks to EPA Smart Growth)

I've been riding the bus daily for a few weeks now. The most interesting effect of this is that it puts me in close contact every day with people I don't know. By close I mean squeezed against me or standing right beside me for ten minutes with no one else around. How do we acknowledge each other's humanity (or not) as we stand in a common time and place and purpose?

I am guilty of sitting next to someone without saying hello... thighs pressing, no acknowledgement. I have walked to a bus stop with three or four people all staring into the concrete or up into the sky and joined the common denial of our shared presence. It's pretty easy to do. Sometimes I rustle around in my bag or stare at the traffic or flip through a book. In a society as lonely as ours can be, making myself effectively alone in a public place is a completely accepted practice and I do it quite well.

That said, I don't like it. There is something clearly sad about choosing isolation out of habit. Right?

So yesterday I broke my spell. They were from out of town, trying to figure out where to go. I was eavesdropping, clearly, but who cares? I spoke up. They were grateful, we talked and I felt useful. I looked around me and suddenly saw everyone on the bus with new eyes. All these Fellow People! I honestly felt warmhearted.

What is there to be afraid of?

I am not scared of people.

They aren't going to hurt me.

They aren't going to reject me.

They might even teach me something new.

The moment reminded me of this experience described by mystic Thomas Merton:

"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream...There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun..."