Tramlines

A ride on a tram usually means a short journey. That’s what this section is going to be about. One emerges to face each day aware of some of the requirements you need to put plans in place, but then there is the unexpected, the unplanned. For example, are we able to forecast just how a conversation will develop, what its outcomes are likely to be or how people will behave?
But why a tramline – because, in stepping out into life each day, our lines converge to provide a vehicle that will carry us on a journey alongside others. Some of those we meet are known to us and others step into our lives momentarily.
It is those unexpected collisions and the ensuing communication that make life a fascinating and exciting journey. And, being peripatetic by nature I have experienced many such engagements during the course of travelling on trams in the many cities that still make use of this mode of transport.
However, not all occur in this way. The one constant in life is that nothing is ever fixed and such events happen unexpectedly, but one is usually on the move for such collisions of minds to connect!
Such an experience occurred recently in late December, on a tram travelling down Collins Street in Melbourne, Australia. It was during the rush hour of homeward bound people exiting the city after work or shopping.
At one stop a man boarded the train. He was dressed in a well-worn yellow tracksuit and was weighed down by an assortment of bulging plastic carrier bags. He sat in a seat across the aisle from myself and another lady, who was talking on her mobile phone. The young man took some time sorting out the bags on the seat alongside and around his feet, during which time he started to berate the lady sitting beside me.
He objected to the lady using a mobile on the tram. When she paid no heed he pulled out an old newspaper from one of his bags, rolled it up, leaned across the aisle and thwacked her on the shoulder. This was only the beginning a long tirade between the two. The man addressed the tram and stated his case between thwacks, some landing on her head – ‘this lady should know better. She is putting us all in danger of radiation from the mobile”. The lady’s shouting got more strident as she told him repeatedly to ‘cut it out, stop that’.
The person on the other end of the line obviously became concerned listening to her shouted retaliations and the woman alternated her shouts with reassurances to the person on line. However, she obviously had no intention of ending the call and finally stood and shouted ‘I’ve had enough, I’m getting off’.
What was that all about you might ask? Later as I reviewed the event I marvelled at life’s use of symbolic image to communicate the very poignancy of this man’s isolation. The event was about a young man, obviously living rough, who needed to be heard and noticed. A reminder of the people who find themselves reduced to this means of survival and sadly of their increase in numbers. It was about lack of control, a need for communication and some semblance of hope and anticipation.
However, the symbolic thrust did not cease with making this one point. The mobile phone as a product of technological development has contributed to sever lines of physical contact on a one-to-one conversational basis. Increasingly humanity is resorting to a remote form of communication that alienates us from the complete experience of interactive contact.
I wondered if life’s superb use of timing was making use of a crowded tram of commuters with time to muse to jolt us into thinking about our isolation. We cannot deny that an increasing number of people make use of the telephone as a tool for mundane rather than specific communication.
We are becoming absent in the presence of our own life. No longer present visually and audibly within our own immediate surroundings we cease to be a participant in the real activity of life as it pulsates about us.
Think about it, physical contact on a one-to-one conversational basis. Increasingly humanity is resorting to a remote form of communication that alienates us from the complete experience of interactive contact.
I wondered if life’s superb use of timing was making use of a crowded tram of commuters with time to muse to jolt us into thinking about our isolation. We cannot deny that an increasing number of people make use of the telephone as a tool for mundane rather than specific communication.
We are becoming absent in the presence of our own life. No longer present visually and audibly within our own immediate surroundings we cease to be a participant in the real activity of life as it pulsates about us.
Think about it…