AIAI-assisted translation·Read the source version
Two weeks ago, I began returning from school by metro instead of taking the school bus.
School ends at two. I walk about two hundred metres beyond the gate and wait for a bus. Compared with buses elsewhere in the city, those in Vomero are relatively punctual. After about twenty minutes on board, I get off near the station and walk another five hundred metres to the metro.
My home lies near the edge of the urban area, where public transport is limited, so I first take the metro to eat near Garibaldi central station. By the end of lunch it is around three in the afternoon. If I have nothing else arranged, I leave the station and wait for a bus. Traffic jams are common there and sometimes the wait lasts an hour. The bus journey itself consumes another half-hour, so I arrive home close to five.
That is the timetable created by changing how I travel after school. It certainly takes longer than the school bus, but for me the metro is still preferable. The school bus is point-to-point. Apart from getting on and off, nothing in the process is under my control. It carries me along a route decided in advance and delivers me to the shop, where I must spend the rest of the day in noise and without daylight. On the metro, if a carriage is too loud, I can move away or simply wait for the next train. If someone shouts beside my ear, I can leave and find somewhere else to concentrate on my own affairs. I can control part of my life.
It is deeply uncomfortable to have one’s life invaded. Whenever I attend to my own work, noise inevitably enters my ears, yet I cannot reduce it or move away from its source. It is like walking along a road at one’s own pace only for the ground to begin rising, falling and shifting, forcing each step to become alternately hurried and slow. The feeling is simply unpleasant. I want to reach my destination in my own way.
The change has brought another benefit: I now have opportunities to exchange a few words with people. At school, some classmates have studied alongside me for seven years and others for three, yet for some reason I find it difficult to do anything with any of them. I often arrive without speaking and leave without speaking. For an ordinary person, this is not a healthy condition. In such a long and noisy silence, the mind easily becomes sensitive and painful.
My social ability has certainly deteriorated a great deal, but at least now I can say a sentence or two to someone travelling with me. What use is that? It keeps me from floating above reality. Moving and speaking in the physical world draws me a little way out of illusion. My feet genuinely feel the ground beneath them, and my attention can rest on the things around my body rather than being trapped in tiny details of how others treat me or in useless remarks online.
Action must be taken under one’s own direction: actively doing what one wants to do. Acting passively only produces greater passivity, losing the self in a downward spiral. When hesitation repeatedly surrounds something one wants to do, one should act directly and let that action improve the self and produce confidence. Confidence cannot be granted by imagination. It can only be acquired through the response to action. Even failure reveals what effort was made, rather than leaving behind nothing at all.