Life lessons from the bus stop

I learn something new everyday.

Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that either buses hate me or I am just incompetent at navigating the MTD bus system.

This epiphany was a long time in the making. It began last year with a trip to downtown Champaign that ended up taking me to Savoy. Apparently, some bus routes change from afternoon to evening. The bus driver told me people make this same mistake all the time, which was some consolation as long as it wasn’t a lie to make me feel like less of an idiot. But my friend was the person who told me which bus to take, so I guess she didn’t know either.

Lesson #1: Always ask the bus driver if the bus is going where you think it’s going. Also, actually look up routes instead of relying on what people tell you because chances are, they are as fallible as you are.

This year, I took the bus to a center in Champaign to interview some sources for a story. When it was time to go home, the bus drove past me. After I ran down the street to try to chase it down, I realized I must not have been standing in the right place. Luckily, I had also looked up a later route, so I crossed the street to stand in front of some random person’s house in the middle of nowhere and waited, hoping none of the scary Rottweilers barking at me could jump over their owner’s fence. When the next bus came, I waved it down like a mad woman because there was no way this driver could go past me without stopping to at least make sure I wasn’t about to go postal on the entire neighborhood.

Lesson #2: Always make sure you’re standing in the right place to get picked up by the bus. If there are no signs, do your best to guess and don’t be afraid to wave frantically at the bus driver, no matter how stupid you may look.

Against my better judgment (and my mom’s warnings), I took the bus again to go to a meeting in Urbana. When my stop was announced, another passenger pulled the yellow cord, and I got off with her. I soon realized that she had gotten off at her apartment building rather than the actual stop, so I had absolutely no idea where I was. I hustled to a school down the street and found out my stop was too far for me to walk to, so I had to call for a ride from someone at the meeting.

Lesson #3: Just because someone pulls the cord, it doesn’t means she’s actually getting off at the stop itself, so always ask. And no matter how many times you ride the bus and something bad happens, there are always more adventures to be had, so just stop while you’re ahead.

I have learned a lot from taking the bus. Most of all I learned that for some reason, buses and I just don’t mesh well together. However, every time I rode the bus, I never made the same mistake again. Instead, I made a new mistake and consequently, gained another tiny kernel of knowledge.

We can learn so much from what we do, and we are the better for it. If you knew in the past what you know now in the present, would you do something differently? I wouldn’t.

Without doing everything I’ve done in the past, I wouldn’t have the same knowledge that I have today. I couldn’t go back in time to fix anything because I wouldn’t know what to change. The important question to ask ourselves is not what we should have done differently in the past but what we can do differently in the future. And the knowledge we’ve gained through experience should help us answer that question, even if it means never taking the bus again.

Mary Beth is a sophomore in Media.