Yet Another Bus Driver Is Hired
Reflections on transience
Far too many of our relationships are transient. This is an ambient trauma, for we are designed for commitment and community. The better fruits of connection take time and trust to ripen. Many of us are living on an emotional diet of unripe fruit.
An example will aid in illustrating this. Imagine you are a bus driver in a major city, and a good one. You throw yourself into your work; you warmly greet each passenger; you take pride in getting everyone where they need to go. After serving reliably for some years, having experienced all of the possible things that can go wrong, and being one of the most trusted and venerable bus drivers, you are promoted to the role of trainer for new hires.
Each new bus driver who is placed under your tutelage enters into rather a deep relationship with you, don’t you think? Certainly we recognize it as such when a great, say, martial arts master takes on a pupil. Now, you are only a bus driver, which is perhaps a fair bit simpler and less cool—but it is the game you know, it is the life you lead, and you are initiating the new hire into that life, that they might share it, know its ins and outs, its subtle resonances, its agonies and joys. This is a true apprenticeship: a transmission of life. And with the two of you being together eight hours a day, every day, for weeks, it is likely that you will get to know each other reasonably well. You will at least be in the early stages of developing a rapport. To teach, and be taught, is a living process of love.
Don’t you think it would be rather discombobulating for your social instincts—for your heart, I should say—to get to know this person, mentor them, share time and love, only for them to graduate from their training with you and become a fully endowed bus driver. The next day, you meet a new trainee, and the process repeats.
This constant turnover is something very sad and unnatural. Now, something being unnatural does not necessarily mean it is bad. But it surely means it has a better than average chance of being bad, and either way, it will take some getting used to. And depending on how unnatural the thing is, it may be impossible to fully get used to. A tiger can never fully adapt to its cage.
We are more adaptable than tigers, and most people are able to get used to the transience—although not all: some people become incels. These tend to be people who take longest to open up and feel comfortable with another person; but they crave deep connection as much as anyone. In pain, they kill or bury the part of themselves that wants this.
The question is: what do we lose in getting used to this? I think we lose some of our openness to others. With each new bus driver trainee, you lean into the burgeoning rapport a little less. You share and receive a little less each time. Perhaps eventually, the whole thing becomes perfunctory.
These relationships are meant to deepen and generate a shared life. If you let them, they will do this; it is the natural course. But the new bus driver hire cannot be under your wing forever; he must fly the nest and go drive his own bus; this was the very telos and occasion for your relationship in the first place.
Not every connection needs to blossom into a perfectly comfortable and trusting friendship. It’s fine, and even nourishing, to have some transient encounters in your life. Smiling at a stranger on the street, exchanging a few pleasant words with your seatmate on the ski lift. Little ephemeral connections like this enrich a life. But the ratio is off! Far too few of our relationships have the permanence required to fully give yourself to the other. Learning to love a specific person takes time and vulnerability.
Most people only have blood relatives, perhaps a spouse and some kids if you’re lucky, perhaps a few friends if you’re really good at staying in touch. Even this, I submit, is not enough. The ratio is way off. And many people are not so lucky: evidence of endemic loneliness is not hard to find. But most of these achingly lonely people are surrounded by others every day. It is too much transience.
It is difficult for the human heart to metabolize endless turnover. I have known people, particularly in hippie circles, whose social instincts have broken down entirely; they are forever frozen at the early superficial stage of getting to know someone. Often they are masters at hiding their crippled heart, and may appear the very picture of vivacity. Or else they are quite obviously messed up. But they are everywhere, these people who can no longer let anyone in, and usually it’s not because of some grand betrayal or trauma, but only the normal flux of transience. These people once attached deeply. Unlike with a more obvious trauma, it is difficult for them to conceptualize or process their hurt. After all, nothing has really happened to them. People come, people go, and it’s normal. Also unlike a traumatic event, this wheel just keeps on turning.
People who work service jobs may perhaps bear the brunt of this misalignment between the kind of creatures that we are and our socioeconomic system. Because, after all, we are made to serve each other. The sorts of jobs these people are doing are really real. Such as, someone whose job it is to take care of other people’s children. Taking care of other people’s children is one of the most fundamental acts of human love. It is what makes us a tribe, a collective body, something more than individual families. As long as people are taking care of other people’s children, we will know that the spirit of community is still alive. It is verily a sacred role, and a truly human society would honour it. But look at how this pure thing is channeled into our civilization. The childcare worker is dealing not with the children of her own brothers and sisters, who are committed to her and who serve her in turn, and who have known her since day one—but the children of a bunch of strangers, in rotating endless batches. Each batch, each iteration, she is able to give a little less of her heart. She gets worn out!
A person with a gift for taking care of children is built to nurture deep relationships with these children as they grow up. One day, the child will be fully grown, and there will always be this tender bond between the two. It’s ridiculous to have the child-carer specialize in three-to-five-year-olds, and only know each child for a year or two! She looks after these children long enough to come to love them, and then they go off to school, which I am also not such a big fan of. The children, for their part, will get used to the rotation of new teachers and classmates; this may be the only way school really prepares them for the workforce…
The child-carer, meanwhile, has no other option but to keep plugging away in her niche. What, you would have her find another job? This is the life she knows; it’s what she loves and is good at. Yet the macro-structure of society itself saddles her job with sadness. The most fundamental aspect of this relationship—its continuity, the growing-together—is taken away. It’s almost as if we expected people to swap spouses every year. Which fruits of marriage but the most superficial and meaningless would remain? Yet we accept this arrangement for nearly every other type of human relationship.
We achieve the greatest heights of communion only in time, in long-term relationships. We live in time, and it takes time for us to become one, as God is one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This process doesn’t happen through sensible transactions or through a vague affinity with all humanity. It can only happen with certain other people in a certain place, with all the time in the world to come to know and love them better.