A section of my readers celebrated the start of the new year 1445 (also called Muharram) recently. To them, I extend my sincere prayer for a good experience on this new spin around the sun.
Young learners sing an action-song, The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round. The song perpetuates itself by listing the activities related to this learning encounter, for instance, the people on the bus, the baby on the bus and so on. This is a rudimentary but essential learning experience that deals with time and motion.
It also touches on as many ancillary learning areas as the teacher can initiate or exact from her charges. For example, social interaction, paying for service, time management, social activity.
It meets all the requirements for successful cognition that will lay the basis for higher learning later on. It ticks all the boxes in my constant agenda for improved literacy. This includes clear articulation, rationale, logic, numeracy, music, and so on.
The song itself is a cohesive agent and also allows for dramatisation which in itself taps into the experiential life of the participants. Educators use the didactic agency to demythologise the natural fear of the unknown.
Which brings us to the point of this week’s piece. Just as we are aware of the experience of riding on the bus, so we experience and celebrate the renewed spin around the sun for the New Year referred to earlier. It reminded me that we are all on this bus called Earth.
We are together on this trip, whether we admit it or not. There is no alternative. I have a reasonable working knowledge of the Holy Writs of Christianity and Islam. I am aware that, during his first sermon, the Prophet (PBUH) exhorted the congregation to act out the responsibility of their sojourn on this planet.
Adherents were caretakers of the gifts the Creator supplied freely and generously. A reference is made to a tree that achieves full fruition, then unselfishly gives of its fruit to those who are in need. When our time comes to be judged, we will be judged on how we acted towards fellow travellers on the bus, whose wheels, we sing, go round and round.
Christianity also espouses the same notion, that we are entrusted with talents and gifts for service to fellow travellers, if only to reinforce a basic truth, that we are all brothers. Would you say I am milking imponderables by overthinking the parallel experiences of a simple bus ride and a lifetime that is a gift from God? You be the judge.
Take time to judge our present state of affairs. What kind of bus ride are we having? What are our chances of having a joyous and memorable ride? After all, the Creator Himself put us here.
Daily, one sees how unhappy most of the passengers are. And how futile the ride on the bus might end up, considering the devastating mismanagement and greed that accompany and dehumanise us. Essentially, we are all the same.
We all deserve some fun on this one ride we are given. Yet some of the fellows on this ride exploit weakness, a lack of resistance and all sorts of unspeakable compromises from the travellers just for the sake of having a smooth and trouble-free ride.
This should not be so. All of us on the bus must note the divisions, the disparities that sour our day, and the sordid collusions that deprive us of the joy of being. I do not wish to pontificate on elections and strategies for unseating a failed regime.
I just want us all on the bus to sing together and perhaps ask what the people on the bus are prepared to do to improve the situation. It cannot go on like this.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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