Life is like a...

No, not a rollercoaster.

Not a bed of roses either.

Down with the cheese. Up for the strange: Life is like a busride.

Seriously, it's bumpy, but you're still on it, there are pitstops where you could get out but then you'd have to take the risk to alight, not knowing where the hell you are or what the hell you're doing or if the next bus will bring you to the right place.

You'd never know the kind of people you're going to meet on the same bus.

The problem is you never know which direction you're heading in. You're just going... occasionally hitting potholes, going up curbs.. yet if you never alight, you'd never get any experience of life outside. Just meaningless scenery, rolling by, seemingly stationery with the motion of the bus but you know its never really.

Bus interchanges serve as transition zones. Like between secondary school and college. Between the end of higher education and career. Between teenage years and adulthood. There are so many other options to pick and you just have to pick one bloody bus at the interchange and GET ON.

And there are the speed changes. Time and spatial variation. Unconscious, but happening.

Fascinating isn't it.

After a while you might realise this bus is taking you in nothing but loops and the same scenes are going by again and again then you have no choice but to get your ass off to change your route in life.

Eventually you'd start recognising places and learning things and meeting new people along your way in life's path of discovery and blah and eventually one day you might be able to plot your own route to an actual destination.

Instead of wandering around aimlessly, trying to get there by mere happenstance, though we'd have to spend more time at bus-stops plotting our way and ageing at the same time, perhaps the slower, less impulsive way will get us there.

And this is yet another parallel: youth is a time of hot blood and discovery, when you hop on and off buses whenever something outside the window fascinates you. Mid-life comes a time of reflection over stupid mistakes (perhaps even involvement in motor accidents) and missing buses that take forever to come and taking the wrong bus in the wrong direction. At the end of the day you accept life as it is and choose carefully that final bus that you think will lead you there.

I seem to have this strange notion that if you in fact think very absolutely that the bus you had taken is the right bus, then it will bring you there.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for reality, no thanks to past experiences with public buses that have ever led me into entirely foreign and desolate territory in which I felt, without a doubt, hopelessly, appallingly and desperately lost.