Kwentong Jeepney

I never really liked commuting although I enjoy travelling. It’s weird, but what I mean by this is that, I don’t like the feeling of being inside of something. Enclosed, bounded and not doing anything – the feeling of being static while the world around you is moving.

It’s not the speed, it’s the feeling of being able to go somewhere or achieve something without you exerting any effort but still getting that which you want to get. 

It’s how I feel when I'm commuting, I just sit there then the next thing you know, you are already at your destination.

What’s more than this perverted idea is perhaps because of this certain irrational fear that’s building up inside me whenever I’m inside a car, jeep, taxi or a van. 

The stillness of the air inside the vehicle creates the very ground for my paranoid thoughts to germinate and breed. I find enclosed spaces fettering, but no, it’s not claustrophobia (because I don’t have issues with elevators), it’s just that riding makes me feel irrationally uncomfortable. 

This paranoia where I imagine fantasies going tragic, and all those crap, makes me project a calm image: I try to sit at a corner and keep quiet, trying to show calmness but deep within me are erratic and baseless fears building up. 

I remember my entire 5 years of studying; from pre-school to grade 3 was hell. Good thing, (or bad?) when the killer quake hit the city, I was forced to transfer to the school just beside our house (actually, my fear of travelling is one of the reasons why I prefer to transfer, the earthquake was just secondary).

I never problematized riding again; and good thing, high school was no less different. My school is just half a kilometer away from our house, though, there were still moments when I have to ride and the same thing, paranoia’s eating me up. 

What made me overcome this ridiculous fear was perhaps my love for sleeping. I sometimes sleep inside the jeep (if I am to define sometimes as 90% of the time). 

The irony here is that, for a person who is having difficulty sleeping at night, I automatically nap when I’m inside a vehicle. When I do reach that sleeping state, It’s so ineffably serene and so peaceful.

It’s so wonderful to be able to shut off your thoughts, to forget the world for several minutes and be subconsciously aware of time and space. It’s the subconscious working because you still know when to wake up and feel that you are near your destination.

When I fetched my kid from school earlier, I felt the urge of my eyes seducing my thoughts while we were at the jeep. The jeep seems like a big hammock, cradling me to sleep. I gently closed my eyes, let nothingness fill my thoughts, then I started attaining that peaceful state, half-sleep, half-awake moment. However, my meditation was disturbed by some giggling and whispering. 

My nap was cut short because there were three college girls, staring at me and my kid, laughing at us while we were ‘meditating’. When I looked at what was so funny about me and my kid, I myself started smiling because I saw that my kid was sleeping on the same position as I was. We were both clasping our hands together in between our legs, our back resting at the side part of the jeep, and the thing that they were laughing at, was how we were trying so hard to balance our heads, trying to fight gravity, heads swaying to and fro, as if rock stars head banging to a melodious tune. 

I woke him up and let his head rest on my lap and use his bag as his pillow. I got conscious so, I basked on the fear and hated those girls for disturbing what’s supposed to prosper as a fantastic dream.

The travel took eternity, when I can no longer contain my boredom and curiosity, I woke him up and asked, “why do you always sleep inside the jeep?” He said, “I’m scared kasi, maybe a car will hit the jeep. I sleep so that I will not see it if ever we bump with another car.” 

I laughed at his answer because is this really how strong my genes are? Is it really possible that reasoning can be passed on to your kids? He then asked me, “Why do you sleep inside the jeep?” All I ever said was, “Because I’m tired. I am always tired.”

In a hypocritical and selfish way, I explained to him that his fears are baseless. Drivers are always cautious and that if he prays, everything will be ok. This I guess is what my parents failed to do, talk to me and make me have faith on something higher. I mean, it really doesn’t matter if there is indeed a higher being or not, but without faith, paranoia is sure to breed. I know how fudging difficult it is to be paranoid, and I don’t want my kids to undergo the same thinking, the same experiences and the same thoughts as I am having. What if, unlike me, they easily give up to the absurdities of reality? In fact, I don’t even want them to see the absurdities that I see. I just want them to be, let me say, normal.

Perhaps it’s the lack of Faith that made me like this, although reason tells me that faith is actually a blind and irrational acceptance of something, I can’t even go to that part since we can also use the same argument against reason. Real, fake – everything is constructed by the brain because it always reconstruct reality at every conscious moment. 

So what is real, faith or reason? It’s pointless since they are both paradigms of the brain. I mean, reason comes from the brain, but how can one say that Faith isn’t coming from the brain? Every idea, concept, etc. is always at the mercy of the brains ability to construct reality. I am not a neuro-scientist nor a psychologist but I guess I do know something about the brain as I have been fixating myself with it in almost my entire academic life. I mean, the clichéd “the red that you see is not the same red as others see” kind of argument can apply to this. 

The whole reality that we see is but a result of our ability to put together small pieces of the puzzle, and the multiplicity of results happen because of the fact that we can put puzzle pieces anywhere we want to put them. There are no ‘musts’, just pure creativity since it is your life that you are trying to make sense of and obviously, it is your brain that’s working, not theirs. 

However, this fact doesn’t mean that we can’t put a direction to how the brain will think. It’s not forcing it to go this way or that, but it is actually guiding it to a ‘less dangerous’ path. So going back to faith, I am re-puzzling my kid’s way of creating his reality; I want him to realize that there is something or someone more powerful than him. 

I don’t want paranoia or pride to rule over him, in short, I don’t want him to be like me. 

Call it selfish but, I don’t think he can survive the dangerous path of reason. Anyway, I am not fool proof, perhaps soon, he will bask on the same perilous thoughts as I am having, but that won’t be my problem anymore. All I know is that I will be guiding him and teach him to stand on his own. 

What’s scaring me is that in oh so many ways and instances, I am seeing a lot of my puzzled self through my kid and I hate it. I hate that this travel seems to take eternity (well of course, time moves slow because our brain distorts reality as it reacts strongly to novelty than repetition) So, this moment seems to be so long because me and my kid is doing something different today. 

He made me dwell into thinking, he made me think again and I dislike it. But in an altogether way, as I look at him, I guess it’s also time for me to fix this irrational paranoia.

I have to believe in what I told him, that everything’s gonna be okay. I have to remove the feelings I feel inside closed vehicles: you know, the feeling as if you are inside a crucible where all of yourself, body, spirit, thoughts both rational and irrational are being melted and made into something else. 

I mean, it’s so bounded and constricted – but I guess, I have to accept this reality that I also need someone to guide me in a direction which isn’t based on my proud brain or paranoia. I have to accept the fact that there are things which I cannot change, like riding a vehicle (I can’t ask my son to walk 7 kilometers with me while carrying his bag!) 

Instead of being eaten up by the fear, I have to find “novelty-ous” ways to overcome this and not dwell on the repetition (i.e. sleeping). 

Perhaps, there’s beauty in this, perhaps.

Since we are still far away from our destination, I gently massaged his hair, let his head rest on the bag and said: “Sige na anak, go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up when we’re there na.”

And so he did.

And I went back to musing.