The Serene Taxi Driver
I have a box full of notebooks that contain my writings from pre laptop days. Most of those scribbles have no value and are irrelevant, but there are a few thoughts or observations that are okay and relevant. One of them is ‘The Serene Taxi Driver’, and it’s relevant here because the guy had an amazing peacefulness and serenity even though he was a poor taxi driver spending his days endlessly navigating the noisy and fume-filled streets of Bombay (now Mumbai).
For me, and for everyone really, such a life would be hell on earth. We might do it if we had little choice, but we wouldn’t be happy and content, as that would seem almost impossible, yet he was.
It kind of blew my mind and hammered home to me that we can control what we feel almost regardless of our surroundings. It’s possible to have an oasis in the desert.
It happened like this;
My Israeli girlfriend and I were making our way back to Goa after doing a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. Well, I think that’s what we were travelling back from, but it’s 29 years ago so can’t remember too well…
Anyway, we were getting a taxi from the overnight train to the bus station. Normally, getting a taxi in these places is a bit of a hassle; there is lots of initial haggling to get a reasonable price, and then usually one has to bat away some more little scams through the journey and at the final destination. Being a taxi driver in such an environment is a tough life, and they rarely have foreigners as customers, so it’s understandable they seek to make the most of it when the chance arises.
But this guy wasn’t like this at all and was actually fine just charging us the meter price - almost unheard of for us foreigners - but what was really impressive was how serene, and serene is the right word here, he was. Chaotic traffic, horns blaring, people shouting, but he was just happy in his own little bubble; what happened outside of him was irrelevant as, obviously, he had an oasis inside.
What his religion was - if he was Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or Christian, or even if he was religious at all - I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter as his beliefs were clearly the right ones for him.
Of course, there are many very happy people in the world; he’s not unique, but most happy people live in a reality that easily supports that happy state. While I’m sure his life involves much more than his taxi driving job, that job would be torture to most of us, and we’d struggle to rise above it. Typically, we’d blame our circumstances and look at the job as an ugly means to an end - we think we’ll be happy one day, but it’s impossible now.
Obviously, the point of this little blog post is that when we see the extremes, such as Buddha or this taxi driver, we can grasp that we can generate the feelings we call happiness within and that this process is largely independent of our external reality.
