“Gentleman,” began a voice in my head. “Give the lady your seat.”
“But… why?” I protested.
“What do you mean ‘why?’ She’s old dammit. How can you even respond with that, man?”
“But that’s merely a fact, not an argument,” I replied. “I mean… there are over 50 able-bodied people on this bus. Why should it be me?”
“Fiinneee,” the voice sighed. “Keep your seat. I always knew you were a horrible person.”
“Now, that’s not true,” I protested, again. A moment passed. “Alright then, you guilt-ridden piece of shit,” I added.
“Mama, bismillah,” I called, vacating the seat for the old woman.
“God bless you, son!” she responded shakily, sinking into the plush leather seats I had sacrificed.
It was early morning. The bus began to move, slowly at first, like a snail, only that it sped up after a while. Its engines hummed, its driver honked, and it found its way through the tumultuous Gwarzo road. It would be another twenty minutes before I reached my destination. The night before, I had a delirious fever that kept me awake and, standing on that crowded bus, my knee could barely support me.
Photo by Gracia Lam
When I sat in class that day, during a lecture on Electromagnetics Engineering, my mind kept racing back to the memorable moments on the bus: the old woman coming on board, the conversation I had in my head with yet another illusion of my “self,” and how the old woman returned my seat when we reached her stop.
I was no longer bothered by my knee. We underrate the power of a boring lecture to overwhelm our inconveniences into oblivion, I thought. More importantly, how strange the movies our brains play on the cinematic screens that are our minds.
All this was roughly three years ago. Today, I sit at my desk pondering on what to write for the first campaign of this newsletter, and my mind drifts back to the same morning. How could a bus ride so greatly shape the way I see the world?
Over the years, I met with more diverse people, each with a unique thought process, from across this country and beyond than I’d ever imagined I would. And every time, they remind me of the fact that they are all individuals with a complicated set of values, proud languages, obstacles and dreams; a whole other universe, independent of me or anything I hold dear.
I watched countless movies similar to the old woman’s play out, but with distinct, more interesting storylines.
Oddly enough, I still get angry when I remember that, prior to meeting this woman, I was too trapped in my mind’s maze to pay much attention to the world around me. Most of us mask this by getting even more involved in our life’s tiniest details. It is much simpler to drown in ourselves and not give too many damns that see the real reality as it is, right? Well, for many, it seems so.
If only we could try to experience life as others do, we’d understand them far better, and it’d make our interactions much more fulfilling.
Halfway across the world, for instance, as your eyes scan these very words, there is a starving child whose parents were killed in a war that is still ongoing. His innocent bright mind wanders about, and he sits in the dark — literally and figuratively.
Quietly, he sits, without panicking, as he had exhausted all his energy in being clueless about what to do or where to look or how everything got turned upside down and even the grown-ups appeared to have lost their fucking minds. Though only eight, and drunk in his childishness, it all doesn’t make any sense.
He sits atop what is left of what was once a mighty monument. It is probably a museum, filled with an eternity of human history. His parents likely took him there as a child when they were alive. As he’d gotten older, his mother told him he had had a lot of fun that day, even though he couldn’t recall any of it. Today, he sits there: a hopeless kid on a dead building in a ghost town.
Tomorrow morning, when your younger brothers take to the street to play football or whatever kids play these days, he will be dead of hunger and dehydration. When your siblings get home later in the afternoon, all dusty and filthy, his motionless body would remain dead. Years from now, your siblings might grow to become lawyers and doctors and engineers... their story continues; this child’s story ended before it even began.
Of course, there is hardly anything you can do to save this child. He might only exist as a figment of your imagination, but it isn’t crazy to assume his suffering is real. Oh, wait… it is real!
No one is asking you to be a superhero, abandon your life, and save the world. You can’t, sadly. As a matter of fact, no one person can. But how many strangers do you meet in… uhmm… say, a year? A lot? Cool. How often do you look at them and see, not just another person, but one from a totally different family, with fascinating and darker stories about their lives?
Let’s zoom in a tad closer. Ever thought that maybe your boss’s anger issue has nothing to do with you and that he had been through a traumatic incident that changed him? Still not an excuse to be an asshole? Yeah? Okay, maybe that’s how his parents appreciated him as a child and he’s simply thanking you through a sequence encoded in his DNA — something we can all agree he has no control over.
Photo by Miles Johnson
I imagine the old woman from my bus ride returning home later that evening. I can see her sitting with her friends and talking about whatever elderly people talk about. I could see a conversation about the younger generation coming up and the lamentations of how inconsiderate we young people are — “fucking millennials, huh?” I picture this old woman, whose name I don’t even know, in the same shaky voice, proudly decrying the stereotype.
Nothing might have happened, of course. She probably reached home and never thought about it ever again. For all I know, she could be a horrible person and I shouldn’t have given her my seat. Still, I shared both versions to illustrate how we make these choices all the time. We accrue a story, albeit a silly one, and once we come to believe it, we ignore every other possibility.
Yes, your friends don’t chat you up; no, it isn’t simply because they’re richer than you now. Yes, your driver is always late; no it isn’t because he doesn’t take the job seriously. Yes, they reject your offer; no, it isn’t for your skin color. Yes, it happened; no, your explanation isn’t the reason. Not necessarily. No matter how complicated your life seems, until you immerse yourself into the other party’s reality, it’s impossible to grasp their “why.”
It might also be impossible for us to save everyone (or anyone, really) from the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, or Mexico. We might not even afford warm blankets for the homeless people we pass by every day, shivering on the bare ground, and snuggling with the only belonging they seem to possess. Hell, we might not even afford to give up our seat for an old lady? But we can try.
The butterfly effect is not a myth; no action is inconsequential. Empathizing with everybody we meet, even if we’ll likely never meet them again, might ultimately end up preventing the war that ended the life of some kid at the farthest part of the world.
It's not necessary to make resolutions for the new year. I certainly don’t (and won’t) — just cruising through each year like a madman and it’s been hella fun. However, if all you plan on doing is being more emphatic in the coming year, you’ve already won.